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WIT AND HUMOR 



OF 



BENCH AND BAR 



MARSHALL BROWN 



The riotous tumult of a laugh is the mob-law 
of the features, and propriety the magistrate 
ivho reads the Riot Act. — Holmes 



CHICAGO 

T. II. FLOOD & CO 

1899 



C T^1 






Copyright, 1899, 

BY 

T. H. FLOOD & CO. 









STATE JOURNAL PRINTING COMPANY, 

Printers and Stereotypers, 

madison, wis. 



PREFACE. 



In the spare moments of many busy professional years 
this volume has been edited from the best literature of the 
Old World and the New. 

Wit, in its finest sense, is wisdom. In its more popu- 
lar sense, wit is lightning, humor the atmosphere in which 
it plays ; wit — spontaneous, keen, cutting, destructive ; 
humor — creative, sympathetic, broadly human. Dr. Ful- 
ler's remark that a "negro is the image of God cut in 
ebony," is humorous. Horace Smith's inversion of it, that 
" the task-master is the image of the devil cut in ivory," is 
witty. Washington Irving's skit on the Yankee lawyer, 
converted on seeing a ghost, and after that never cheat- 
ing — "except when it was to his own advantage," is hu- 
morous; and so is the pathetic appeal of the Irish barrister: 
"Gentlemen of the jury, think of his poor mother — his 
only mother." 

The author believes that the volume contains the best 

sayings of eminent men, of bench and bar, at home and 

abroad. 

Marshall Brown. 

Pittsburgh, Pa., November, 1899. 



Wit, bright, rapid and blasting as the lightning, flashes, strikes and 
vanishes in an instant; humor, 'warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, 
bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light. — Whipple. 

Things are all big with jest; nothing thafs plain 

But may be -witty, if thou hast the vein. — Herbert. 

Whenever you fi)id humor, you find pathos close by its side. 

— Whipple. 

Impromptu is the touchstone of wit. — Moliere. 



Isaac Barrow, an eminent English pulpit orator, denning wit, says : 
" Sometimes it lieth in fat allusion to a known story, or in seasonable 
application of a trivial saying, or in forging an apposite tale; sometimes it 
playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their 
sense, or the affinity of their sound; sometimes it is wrapped in a dress of 
humorous expression; sometimes it lurketh under an odd similitude; some- 
times it is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a quirkish reason, 
in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly diverting or cleverly retorting an ob- 
jection; sometimes it is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, 
in a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plausible reconciling of 
contradictions, or in acute nonsense; sometimes a scenical representation of 
persons or things, a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture passeth 
for it; sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous bluntness 
giveth it being; sometimes it riseth from a lucky hitting upon what is 
strange, sometimes from a crafty wresting obvious matter to the purpose; 
often it consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly 
tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable 
to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language. It is, in 
short, a manner of speaking out of the simple and plain way (such as reason 
teacheth and proveth things by), which by a pretty surprising uncouthness 
in conceit or expression doth affect or amuse the fancy? 

God has given us wit and flavor, and brightness and laughter, and per- 
fumes to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to charm his pained 
steps over the burning marl. — Sydney Smith. 



AUTHORS AND TITLES. 



Abernethy, Lord 153 

Abinger, Lord 132 

Admiralty 1 

Admission to Bar, Examination for 200 

Affidavit, Oratory of 4 

Alderson, Baron 210, 332 

Alibi 7 

Allen, John 11 

Althorp, Lord 14 

Andrews, Charles B 394 

Anomalies 14 

Anti-climax 100 

Appeals, Eloquent 17, 422 

Arabin, Sergeant 211, 460 

Armstrong, Sergeant 211 

Ashman, William N. 28 

Assignments of Error 32 

Attorneys, Repartee and Retort 432 

Avery, Waitstill ••••••••• 244 

Bacon, Lord 35, 245 

Baldwin, Joseph G. 381, 415, 422 

Ball, Justice 107,405 

Bannatyne, Lord 293 

Bar, Examination for Admission to 200 

Barbour, James 36 

Barnes, W. H. L. • 113, 451, 484 

Barrington, Sir Jonah 363 

Bartlett, Ichabod 325 

Barton, George W. 435 

Bates, Edward 37 

Beach, William A. 381, 451 

Begbie, Sir Matthew 512 



Vi AUTHORS AND TITLES. 

Benedict, Kirby 460 

Benjamin, Judah P. 37 

Bennett, George 435 

Benton, Thomas H. 39 

Best, Justice 237 

Black, Jeremiah S 40, 126. 217 

Blackstone, Sir William 491 

Blackman, Daniel 355 

Bleckley, L. E 33, 35, 41, 51 

Bond 44 

George 514 

Bowen, Lord 75 

Boyle, Chief Justice 250 

Brackenridge, Hugh H. 292 

Bradley, Joseph P 45 

Brady, James T 46,333 

Bramwell, Lord 52,405,510 

Braxfield, Lord . . .... 48 

Brevity 49 

Brewer, David J 125,127 

Brewster, Benjamin H. 54 

Bribery ........... 54 

Brice, Calvin S. 55 

Brougham, Lord 57, 290 

Brown, David Paul 129 

James T. 61 

Marshall 254,281 

Browne, Irving 62 

Buller, Francis 63, 196 

Burbank, Justice 527 

Burke, James Francis • . • . j • . . * 63 

Burleigh, Clarence . 66 

Burnand, F. C .200 

Burr, Aaron 67 

Burrowes, Peter 268 

Bushe, Charles Kendal 67 

Butler, Benjamin F. 69,380 

Buzfuz, Sergeant 1 

Cady, Daniel 73 

Campbell, John A 74 

Lord 27,219,341,491 

St. George Tucker 524 



AUTHORS AND TITLES. vii 

Carpenter, Matt • • • 169 

Channell, Sergeant 501 

Charge of Court . . . . . 50,52,54,75,333,388,507 

Chase, Salmon P. 74,302 

Chatham, Lord 328,411 

Chelmsford, Lord . 500 

Chitty, Joseph . . . 385 

Choate, Joseph H 82 

Rufus 69, 86, 87, 379, 385, 410, 472 

Churchill, Lord 94 

Clairborne, Justice 117 

Clare, Lord 95, 151 

Clarke, Richard 473 

Clay, Henry 96, 209, 381, 425 

Clayton, Justice 434 

Cleveland, Grover 99 

Climax, Anti- 100 

Clonmell, Lord . . '. 240 

Cockburn, Lord 101,145,250 

Cockle, Sergeant 496 

Coke, Sir Edward 35,103 

Coleman, Richard H. . 103 

Coleridge, Lord . 104*199,404,453 

Colt, James D 164 

Confession t 108 

Conkling, Roscoe 85, 376 

Contempt of Court 62,110,241,322 

Cooley, Thomas M. 52 

Corwin, Thomas 118 

Coudert, Frederick R. 119 

Court, Charge of 50,52,54,75,333,388,507 

Contempt of 62,110,241,322 

United States Supreme 90,124,225 

Cox, Sergeant 127 

Cross-examination 129,394,509 

Crowle, Sergeant 434 

Curran, John P. 95,115,148,308,343,485 

Davis, David . 127 

Davy, William # 153 

Day, Justice 442 

William R. 155 



yiii AUTHORS AND TITLES. 

De Facto and De Jure 156 

Demurrer ........ 62,156,194,207 

Denman, Lord 77, 158 

Depew, Chauncey M. • 82, 158 

Dillard, John Henry 440 

Divorce ........... 161 

Donovan, J. W. 380,481 

Dooly, John M 165 

Douglas, Stephen A. 167, 294 

Dowse, Richard 168, 212 

Driscoll, Timothy 372 

Drummond, Thomas 169 

Dudley, Justice • 78 

Eldon, Lord 114,169,220 

Ellenborough, Lord 178,338,472 

Eloquence, Tangled 179 

Eloquent Appeals 17, 422 

Epigram 183 

Epitaph .' 186,197,331 

Equity 188,459 

Erie, Lord 189 

Error, Assignments of 32 

Erskine, Harry 489 

John 189 

Lord. . . . . . 131,184,191,382,384 

Esher, Lord 33 

Eskgrove, Lord 260 

Evarts, William M. 198,453 

Examination for Admission to the Bar 200 

Cross- 129,394,509 

Expert 38.210 

Fees, Statutory 212 

Field, Stephen J. . 214 

Fitzgibbon, Lord 153 

Fuller, Melville W. 127 

Fullerton, William 129 

Garland, A. H. 215 

Garrow, Counselor . » 183 

Gibbs, Chief Justice 77 

Gibson, John Bannister ••••••• 32, 217 



AUTHORS AND TITLES. ix 

Gloag, Sergeant ' . , 435 

Gordon, Lord George . 130 

Gould, Justice 155 

Gowns 219 

Grady, Barrister 364 

Graham, Justice 467 

Grant, Sir William . . . . . ... 223 

Grey, Justice 358 

Grier, Eobert C. 224, 512 

Grosscup, P. S. 225 

Grundy, Felix 97 

Haliburton, Thomas 0. 223 

Hall, William M. 220 

Hallett, Justice 18 

Halsbury, Lord 105 

Hammond, Eli S 75 

Hampton, Moses 40 

Hannen, Lord .......... 263 

HarJwicke, Lord 281 

Harlan, John M. 126 

Harrington, Theophilus 226, 458 

Hathaway, Samuel G. 226 

Hawkins, Henry . • 229, 366 

Hearsay 232 

Henry, Patrick 208, 234, 350 

Hermand, Lord 291 

Heywood, Samuel , . . . 187 

Hill, George 313,411,412 

Walter B 360 

Hitchcock, Peter 235 

Hoar, George F. 71, 284, 433 

Holland, Baron 261 

Holt, Lord 236 

Honyman, Justice 53 

Hopkinson, Francis .•••••... 157 

Huddleston, Baron 143 

Hunt, Ward B, 126 

Index . . • • 237 

Ingersoll, Robert G. 237 

Intemperance 5,25,177,240,417 



X AUTHORS AND TITLES. 

Jackson, Andrew ••• 244 

John J. .249 

Handle . . 178 

Jefferson, Thomas 209 

Jeffrey, Francis 145. 250 

Jeffreys, George . . • • 251 

Jekyll, Joseph 184, 187, 253, 331, 398 

Johnson, Andrew «... 253 

Judge, The Outside 254 

Judges, Repartee and Retort . 438 

Jurors, Competency of . 255 

Jury, Charge to 75 

On the 45,258 

System, Defects in 264 

Karnes, Lord . . 266 

Kelley, William D. . 266 

Kennedy, John P. 285 

Kent, James 476 

Kenyon, Lord 130, 267, 343- 

Keogh, William 211,268 

Kirkpatrick, Andrew 458 

Knott, J. Proctor 269 

Lachand, Maitre . • 20 

Lamb, Counselor 196 

Law 277 

Lawrence, William 283 

Lawyers 285 

Lee, George H. 290 

Legislation, 291 

Leonard, Abiel • • • 330' 

Levy, Sampson 209, 292 

Liens 293 

Lincoln, Abraham 141, 143, 211, 294, 481 

Lockwood, Sir Frank 305 

RufusA. 432 

Logic 307,355 

Loomis, A. W. . * 308 

Lowry, Justice • . . 330 

Lumpkin, Joseph H. 33- 



AUTHORS AND TITLES. x i 

MacNally, Leonard 308 

Mansfield, Lord .... 41,259,309,331,340,412,501 

Manson, Edward . 133 

Marshall, John 225,311 

Thomas F. 112, 319 

Thomas M. 320 

Martin, John I. . 17 

Sir Samuel 5a 

Mason, Jeremiah 323 

Mattacks, John 200 

Maule, George , 76, 77, 326, 338, 466, 511 

Maxims 158,327 

Maynard, Sir John 252, 343 

McCallum, Justice 26 

McCartney, William H 343 

McKinley, William 346 

McLaws, William R 329 

McSweeny, John 2& 

Merritt, Thomas 348 

Miller, Samuel F. 124 

Mirehouse, Sergeant 348- 

Montague, Hill 34£ 

Morris, Lord 351 

Mortgage 202,352 

Motions 35& 

Naturalization 358 

Neaves, Lord 337, 536 

Nisbet, E. A 360. 

Norbury, Lord 361, 427 

Norris, Justice 52 

North, Lord 364 

Norton, Sir Fletcher 310 

Nye, James W. 365 

Oath 366 

O'Connell, Daniel 58, 240, 363, 367 

O'Conner, Justice 356 

O 'Conor, Charles 376, 379 

OTarrell, Garret 428 

O'Grady, Baron 68, 377 

O'Loghlen, Sir Bryan . . . . . . . .181 



xii AUTHORS AND TITLES. 

O'Malley, Justice 464 

O'Reilly, James 486 

Oratory 378,403 

of the Affidavit 4 

Oswald, James Francis 33, 385 

Otis. Harrison Gray 385, 529 

Page, Justice 439 

Palgrave, Sir Francis ........ 510 

Park, Allan 110,387,404 

Parker, Amasa J. 476 

Parry. Sergeant 488 

Parsons, Theophilus 379, 385 

Perkins, Constantino 333 

Eli 389 

Perrot, Baron 77 

Peters, John Andrew . 389 

Richard 390 

Petigru, James Louis 219, 315 

Pettifogger 21,391 

Phillips, John F. 398 

Wendell 367,401 

Pleading, Special 404, 518 

Pleas 50,207,302,406 

Plunket, Lord 332, 408, 438, 443 

Pollock, Baron . 409 

Porter, Justice 468 

Precedent 306,410 

Prentice, George D. 412 

Prentiss, S. S 350, 367, 414 

Punctuation 184,419 

<2uarles, J. V. 420 

James ..211 

Raine, Sergeant 184 

Randolph, John 318,367,422 

Receipt 426 

Redesdale, Lord 408, 427 

Reed, Thomas B. 205,378,429,436,519 

Repartee and Retort, Attorneys' ...... 432 

Judges' 438 

"Witnesses' ...... 445 



AUTHORS AND TITLES. x iii 

Reputation, General 448 

Reynolds, Marcus T. • • • 518 

Ridley, Justice 467 

Robertson, Lord 115 

Rombauer, Justice 443 

Romer, Lord Justice 411 

Rose, Sir George 185 

Rosekraus, Enoch H 451 

Ross, John 282 

Russell, Lord 107,452,533 

Ryan, E. G. 391 

Sands, David 407 

Saunders, R. M 453 

Saxe, JohnG 186,454 

Scarlett, Sir James 132, 140, 489 

Scates, C. W 224 

Scott, Sir Walter 457 

Seal . ■ 458 

Selden, John 459 

Sentences 103,229,338,348,362,460,515 

Seward, William H. 300,303 

Seymour, Sir Digby 452 

Sharswood, George ..••••... 33 

Shaw, Lemuel 89, 471 

Sherman, Roger M. 472 

Sherwood, Thomas A. 330 

Shyster 391 

Smith, John W. 281 

Spencer, Ambrose • • • .513 

Joshua A 473 

Spooner, Allen C. 356 

Stanton, Edwin M. 301 

Stein, Philip 440 

Stenography . 473 

Stephen, Justice 332 

Stephens, Alexander H. . . 474 

Stevens, Thaddeus 116, 475 

Stevenson, George 277 

Stewart, William M. 284 

Story, Joseph 49,324,379,476 

Stowe, Edwin H. 322 



XIV AUTHORS AND TITLES. 

Stowell, Lord .••••••... 173 

Strong, William 126 

Strother, Francis 476 

Strout, A. A 437 

Sugden, Sir Edward .« 59 

Sumner, Charles • • 479 

Sutherland, Josiah . . . • ... . . . 479 

Tact 480 

Taddy, Sergeant 110 

Tangled Eloquence 179 

Taylor, Colonel 18 

Tenterden, Lord 490 

Test, Justice • 438 

Testimony 491 

Thatcher, George ......... 443 

Thesiger, Sir Frederick 500 

Thurlow, Lord 501 

Thurston, John M 502 

Tipstaff 178, 333, 438, 502 

Toombs, Robert . • • • 474 

Townsend, J. B 357 

Townshend, Charles 504 

Train, Charles R 164 

Travers, William R. ........ 505 

Turner, Bates . 437 

Turney, James 465 

Underwood, William H. . . 506 

United States Supreme Court 90, 124, 225 

Van Brunt, Justice 83 

Van Buren, John 508 

Vance, Zebulon B 510 

Verdict 510 

Vest, George 399 

Voorhees, Daniel W. 297 

« 

Waite, M. R 284, 515 

Walton, Charles W. 516 

Walworth, R. H 517 

Ward, Baron 251 



AUTHORS AND TITLES. X v 

Ware, Eugene F. 334, 519 

Warner, Charles Dudley . • • 520 

Webster, Daniel 78,323,378,523 

Westbury, Richard 186, 533 

Westmoreland, Lord 179 

Wetherell, Sir Charles . . 534 

Wheeler, E. D 357 

Whiton, Edward V. 534 

Wightman, Justice 442 

Wigs 40 

Wilkins, Charles 25,482,535 

Will 536 

Williams, Elisha 21 

Wills, Justice 433 

Wiltse, H. M. 396 

Wirt, William 315, 316, 411, 531, 540 

Witnesses, Repartee and Retort 445 

Woodle, Isaac 534 

Wright, George G. 243 

Young, Lord . • • • 435 



WIT AND HUMOR 



OF 



BENCH AND BAR. 



Admiralty. — A Court of Inquiry into the burning of 
the emigrant ship Cospatrick at sea was held ; and, after 
its report had been published, the following appeared in 
Punch: — 

"The loss of the emigrant ship Crossoones, which took 
fire on the voyage to Australia, and was burned to the 
water's edge, all hands being either burnt or drowned,, 
with the exception of one man and a boy, was the subject 
of an inquiry held yesterday. 

"The court was composed exclusively of shipowners. 
Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz represented the Board of Trade and 
the charterers, while Mr. Phunky attended on behalf of 
the relatives of the lost passengers and crew. 

" Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, in opening the matter, said that 
they were met to inquire into the loss of the ship Cross- 
bones by fire, together with nearly five hundred lives. 
No doubt such untoward events would occur; but, in 
order to meet the requirements of the Board of Trade, 
certain witnesses, including the survivors, — one man and 
a boy, — would be called to prove that no blame could be 
attached to any one, and that the vessel was all that could 
be desired. 
1 



2 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" The survivors, who had been spending the morning 
at the owners' office, were then brought into court. They 
looked still very ill. 

" James Jonah, able seaman, deposed that he was one 
of the crew of the Crossbones; he had been so ever since 
she was launched; she was then called the Deaths Head. 
She went ashore on her first voyage, and strained herself. 
Was afterwards lengthened and rechristened. Every thing 
went well till the fire broke out. Couldn't imagine how 
she could possibly have taken fire. The cargo was com- 
posed of pitch, tar, resin, oil, paraffine, petroleum, rum, 
brandy, spirits of wine, fireworks, gunpowder, etc. Did 
not consider that an inflammable cargo. Thought the fire 
must have originated in one of the water-tanks. There 
were quite enough boats. None of 'em were of any use. 
Was saved by clinging to a bit of a raft with the boy. 

"Serjeant Buzfuz: And that is how you were buoyed 
up. (Laughter.) 

"Witness: Was rescued by the Peruvian bark Pich- 
Me- Zfy, the captain of which treated us most kindly. Hit 
-everybody but us over the head with belaying-pins. 

" Serjeant Buzfuz was most happy to inform the court 
that it had been intimated to him that Her Majesty's 
government intended presenting the captain, in the course 
•of a year or two, with a kaleidoscope and a tin speaking- 
trumpet. 

" Examination resumed : Considered the Crossbones one 
of the safest ships afloat until she was lost. Would not 
have the slightest objection to have gone to sea in her 
again, with the same cargo, provided he was saved, and 
it was made worth his while. Considered lucifer matches 
on the top of a powder-barrel or petroleum cask rather 
ornamental than otherwise. 

" Mr. Phuuky was proceeding to cross-examine the wit- 
ness, when the court adjourned for lunch. 



BENCH AND BAR. 3 

" On its reassembling, Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz submitted 
to the court that Mr. Phunky had no locus standi. 

" Mr. Phunky said that he appeared for certain persons 
who were not quite satisfied. 

" Serjeant Buzfuz: Some people are never satisfied. 

" Mr. Phunky : I mean to say that they are not satis- 
fied that the vessel was well found. 

"Serjeant Buzfuz: How could she have been well 
* found ' when she was lost ? (Much laughter, which was 
not suppressed.) 

" The boy who was saved was then called, and corrob- 
orated in every particular the evidence of the former 
witness. Thought the fire might have originated in the 
foretop-gallant mast. Felt very hot after climbing up 
there. 

"An experienced stevedore was then called by Mr. 
Phunky, and said that he considered the cargo a most 
dangerous one ; when he was stopped by Mr. Serjeant Buz- 
fuz, who called the attention of the court to the fact that 
witness dropped his ' H's,' and was evidently a most ob- 
jectionable and untrustworthy person. 

" The court allowed the objection, and the witness was 
ordered to stand down. 

" The learned serjeant then said that it appeared to him 
quite unnecessary to address the court any further. 

" The court, after consulting for two minutes and three- 
quarters, said that it was certainly most unfortunate that 
the majority — in fact, a large majority — of the passen- 
gers and crew of the Crossbones should have met with such 
a disagreeable fate ; but it could not be helped. Every- 
thing that science, experience, and skill, as well as petro- 
leum, pitch, tar, gunpowder, spirits, and other powerful 
agents, could do, had been done ; and the court only hoped 
that the owners were fully insured. If the unfortunate 
captain were before them, the court would have immedi- 



4 WIT AND HUMOR 

ately granted him a new certificate, in case his old one 
should have been burnt. The court was unanimously of 
the opinion that the cargo was of a most harmless descrip- 
tion, and properly stowed. They would, however, recom- 
mend, that, in future, the boats should not be launched 
keel-upwards; and that, when Captain Shaw returns from 
Egypt, he should be consulted upon the best method of 
suddenly extinguishing ignited spirits and petroleum, as 
well as fireworks. 

" Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz entirely concurred with the court, 
and was happy to say that the owners were more than 
fully insured. 

" The inquiry then terminated." 

Affidavit, Oratory of.— The oratory of the affidavit 
provokes many a smile. An Irishman swearing the peace 
against his three sons concluded his affidavit: " And this 
deponent further saith, that the only one of his children 
who showed him any real affection was his youngest son, 
Larry, for he never struck him when he was down." 

The following affidavit was filed in the Court of Com- 
mon Pleas, in Dublin, in 1822 : 

"And this deponent farther saith, that on arriving at 
the house of the said defendant, situate in the county of 
Galway aforesaid, for the purpose of personally serving 
him with the said writ, he, the said deponent, knocked 
three several times at the outer, commonly called the hall, 
door, but could not obtain admittance; whereupon this 
deponent was proceeding to knock a fourth time, when a 
man to this deponent unknown, holding in his hands a 
musket or blunderbuss, loaded with balls or slugs, as this 
deponent has since heard and verily believes, appeared at 
one of the upper windows of said house, and, presenting 
said musket or blunderbuss at this deponent, threatened 



BENCH AND BAR. 5 

that, if said deponent did not instantly retire, he would 
send his, this deponent's, soul to the lower regions, which 
this deponent verily believes he would have done, had not 
this deponent precipitately escaped." 

A negro came before a justice of the peace and signed 
a pledge, promising to give up the use of all intoxicating 
liquors. Ten days afterwards the Judge met him, and, 
greatly to his astonishment, found him a good deal under 
the influence of liquor. 

" Why, Erasmus," cried the Judge, " God bless me ! how 
is this, and after your solemn affidavit, too ? You have 
broken your oath, Erasmus." 

" Not at all, Jedge, — not at all, sir ! " cried Erasmus, 
with alacrity. " De affidavy stands as when fust sworn 
and subscribed to; but bein' as you know, Jedge, a man 
of Websterian education, I have added a few trifling codi- 
cils to de original dockerment." 

"Codicils, Erasmus, — what do you mean by codicils? 

"Well, Jedge, I'll explain; I'll give dem codicils to 
you in de regular order. I've got de dockerment right 
here, and I've never let it go out ob my hands since I got 
it ; " and Erasmus drew from over his heart the precious 
paper. With a grand flourish he read : " Codicil de 
fust — Dis codicil is to certify dat de meanin' and intent 
of the above insterment is hereby so moderfied an' set 
aside as to allow de affiant de triflin' indulgence of one 
cocktail befo' he go to breakfas'." 

"Well, Jedge," said Erasmus, lifting his eyes from the 
paper, " dat codicil appear ekal to the requirement of de 
subscriber for about f o' days ; den we had," casting his 
eyes upon the paper, "Codicil de secun' — De above affi- 
davy an' codicil is hereby affirm an' am to remain in full 
fo'ce an' effec', 'ceptin' sich sections, claws, an' parts of 
clawses as would conflic' wid de allowance to de affiant 



6 WIT AND HUMOR. 

of a appetizer before each meal, bein' tree drinks per 
diem, be de same more or less." 

Here Erasmus again lifted his eyes from the document, 
and explained as follows: 

" On dis las' codicil de subscriber existed in tol'able 
comfort about fo' mo' days, when it not bein' found to 
rise to de hight of all demands, I felt obleged, Jedge, to 
add : c Codicil de Third — All de above original docker- 
ment an' codicils are hereby proclaimed to be of full fo'ce 
an' effec', pervided dat no part of dare contents be so 
construed as to interfere wid de inherin' right of de un- 
dersigned affiant and codicilist to partake of some sich 
suitable stimerlant as shall, in his judgment, be deemed 
necessary to de decent and proper arousin' of de dor man' 
energies of his phisical an' mental constitution.' " 

" And is this the last of the codicils, Erasmus ? " 

" It's de finis, Jedge. It appears to fill all de 'quire- 
ments, an' is ekal to all de 'mergencies dat has yet arose." 

The affidavit of the Troy policeman is a gem: "The 
prisoner sat upon me, calling me an ass, a precious dolt, 
a scare-crow, a ragamuffin, and idiot — all of which I 
certify to be true." 

An information, after charging certain defendants with 
the larceny of two pigs and six pigeons, continued : " The 
prosecutor suspecting the above defendants, and procur- 
ing a search-warrant, went to their homes and found the 
fowls under the bed, in which the defendants were sleep- 
ing with their throats cut and partially plucked." 

An Irish witness, having been " sworn to the truth " of 
a written statement he had made regarding an attempted 
murder, afterwards confessed that the major part of it was 
false. " Did you not swear to the truth of it ? " he was 
asked. " Yes ! but I didn't swear to the loyin' part. I'll 
take me oath on that, sorr ! " 



BENCH AND BAR. 7 

Alibi. — A witty Dublin barrister, being asked for a def- 
inition of alibi, replied : " It is a lie by which criminals 
escape punishment." 

An incident in Watsonville, California, illustrates the 
old saw about the fellow who tries to be his own lawyer. 
Mike Murphy was arrested for brutally assaulting a China- 
man, and gave bail for a hearing the next day. Engag- 
ing a lawyer, the latter advised him that he had no 
defence. 

" But," said Mike, " in New York the byes had some- 
thing they used whin in trouble. I think they called it 
an allybye. Can't you thry that ? " 

" I hardly care to try the case, but you can try it your- 
self. Have you a friend you can call to prove the alibi ? 

"Yes; Tim Maginnis." 

" Well, after the Chinaman has presented his case, you 
call Maginnis, and be sure to ask him : 

" ' Mr. Maginnis, where was I when the Chinaman was 
struck in front of the hotel f ' " 

At the hearing, the Chinaman and his witnesses having 
testified to the assault, Mike put Maginnis on the stand, 
and proceeded to examine him. 

" What's your name ? " 

" Tim Maginnis, sor." 

"What's your occupation?" 

" Hod-carrier, sor." 

" Mishter Maginnis, do you understand the nature of an 
oath?" 

"Yes, sor;ItinkIdo." 

" Well, sor, if you undershtand the nature of an oath, 
will ye plaze tell the magisthrate where I was when Isthruck 
the Chinyman in front of the hotel f " 

Mike's alibi went up in the air, and a salty fine on the 
record. 



fc WIT AND HUMOR 

Sir Frank Lockwood got a prisoner off by proving an 
alibi. Some time afterward the Judge met him and said, 
" Well, Lockwood, that was a very good alibi." 

" Yes, my Lord, I had three offered me, and I think I 
selected the best." 

When the Ku Klux troubles were at their height in 
South Carolina, a prominent farmer in one of the inland 
counties was on trial before the United States court for 
complicity in certain outrages committed upon colored 
people. Public sentiment was, of course, strongly on his 
side, and all his neighbors and friends were on hand to 
see him cleared, if possible. The United States district 
attorney was a Yankee " carpet-bagger," as smart as a 
whip, and one who knew with whom he had to deal. 

The defendant went on the stand and told a very plau- 
sible story. Then came the cross-examination. 

" Now, Mr. Jones," said the district attorney, " where 
were you on the night the six colored men were killed at 
Unionville?" 

" That night, suh ? Well, suh, that night I was over in 
Spa'tansburg county a-buyin' of some cattle, suh." 

" And where were you the night the colored women 
were tied up and lashed at Jonesville ? " 

" That night, suh ? Well, suh, that night I was on the 
aidge of Georgia a-sellin' cotton, suh." 

" And where were you on the night that the four col- 
ored men were killed at Tompkinsville?" 

" Well, that night, suh, I was down in Edgefield county 
a-visitin' an uncle of mine who was mighty sick, suh." 

" Well, Mr. Jones, you have given very straightforward 
answers to my questions. I have only two more to ask 
you. Where were you the night the two colored men 
were killed at Batestown ? " 



BENCH AND BAR 9 

" That night, suh ? Well, suh, that night I was up in 
the aidge of No'th Ca'lina attendin' a weddin,' suh." 

"Mr. Jones, where were you the night Cain killed 
Abel?" 

" That night, suh ? " said the defendant, slightly puzzled 
but still unabashed, " why, let me see. Wasn't that about 
the year 1870, suh?" ■ 

The attorney nodded gravely, and there was a hush in 
the court-room. 

" That night, suh, I was at a fishin' frolic on the Broad 
river." 

" That will do," said the district attorney, and court ad- 
journed for dinner. The defendant's son pushed up and 
took his father to one side. 

" Pop," said he, " I hate to say it, but you are the big- 
gest fool in South Ca'lina. Hyeh you just swore that 
Cain killed Abel in 1870, when any common fool knows 
it happened in the first year of the wah." 

And Jones went for a term of years to the United States 
prison at Albany, N. Y. 

In the Quarter Sessions Court of Schuylkill county, 
Pennsylvania, five Hibernians were on trial, charged with 
riot and assault, with intent to kill. The commonwealth 
had made out a strong case, and rested. The defense 
was an alibi. 

By the showing of the prosecution the riot commenced 
after ten o'clock at night. A witness for the defense tes- 
tified that Dennis, one of the accused, was at home and 
in bed with him, before eight o'clock on the evening of 
the affray, and never left it until the row was over — a 
rather improbable story of two Irishmen within sound of 
a " nate little bit of a fight." 

" How do you know it was before eight o'clock ? " asked 
the district attorney. 



10 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" Sure we had a clock in the house." 
" And did the clock strike eight after Dennis came in ?"' 
"Well, no; the clock wasn't shtriking at that time." 
" What was the matter with the clock ? " 
" It was out of order and not going for a few days." 
" Then, if the clock was not going, how do you know 
that Dennis was in before eight o'clock ? " 

"Well, I know that he was in before the time when the 
clock used to be shtriking eight when it did shtrike ! " tri- 
umphantly answered the witness. 

This was a clincher; poor Dennis was convicted. 

In Kentucky, for some years after the rebellion, cour- 
age exhibited and scars received in the service of the lost 
cause were, as a rule, a sure passport to public office. 
The element of capacity being thus minimized, some brave 
but incompetent heroes reached official positions unattain- 
able in less troublous times. One of these, having a smat- 
tering of law and a fervid oratory, was elected district 
attorney. In a murder case, with a plea of " not guilty," 
the prisoner relied on evidence showing an alibi. In clos- 
ing his argument the district attorney was especially ve- 
hement: " Gentlemen of the jury," said he, " the prisoner 
is trying to escape the law by pleading an alibi. What 
is an alibi ? If I had a law dictionary I would read you 
the definition, but in its absence I can repeat to you the 
substance of it. An alibi, as I recollect it, is where a man 
charged with a crime proves that he was somewhere else 
at the very time he committed it." 

The defense was an alibi, and the district attorney was 
cross-examining one of the defendant's witnesses: 

"Are you sure that you saw the defendant in Gaines- 
ville on the seventeenth of the month ? " 

" Yes," said the witness, " it was the seventeenth." 



BENCH AND BAR. 11 

"Now, remember," continued the attorney, with in- 
creasing solemnity, " you are under oath. How do you 
know it was the seventeenth ? " 

" Because the day before " 

" Be careful what you say. Go on." 

"Because the day before was the sixteenth, and the 
day after was the eighteenth." 

Allen, John. — Allen, the witty southern gentleman 
from Mississippi, tells how he came to be a profound law- 
yer. " I want to tell you of the greatest legal victory of 
my life," said he to a party of congressmen swapping 
yarns in the cloak-room of the House. " It was down in 
Tupelo, just after the war. I was at that time a practic- 
ing lawyer, — that is, I practiced when I had any cases 
to practice with. One day ' Uncle ' Pompey, a negro of 
the settlement, came into my office and said: 

' Mars John, I wants you to el'ar me. I'se gwine to 
be 'rested for stealin' two hams outen de cross-road store.' 

1 "Well, Pompey, did you really steal the hams ? ' 

' Mars John, I just took 'em.' 

4 Did any one see you?' 

' Yas, boss,' said the old negro disconsolately, ' two ole 
white buckrats.' 

' Well, Pompey,' I replied, ' I can't do anything for you 
under the circumstances.' 

' Now, Mars John,' said old Pompey, ' here's ten dol- 
lars. I jist want you to try.' 

" Well, I consented to try," said Allen. " The case was 
to be heard before an old magistrate named Johnson. 
He was totally uneducated, and was moreover a perfect 
dictator. No negro ever came before him who was not 
fined the maximum penalty. The magistrate heard the 
case. That Pompey stole the hams there could be no 
doubt from the testimony. I did not cross-examine the 



12 WIT AND HUMOK. 

witnesses; but when the testimony was all in, I arose, 
and in my most dignified manner addressed the magis- 
trate: 'May it please your honor, it would be useless for 
me to argue the position my client holds, and before one 
who would adorn the Superior if not the Supreme bench 
of this grand old commonwealth; and I may say that 
those who know you best say that you would grace even 
the Supreme Court of the United States, — the highest 
tribunal in the land. It will be useless to dwell upon the 
testimony ; you have heard it, and know the case as well 
as I do. However, it may not be out of order for me to 
call your honor's attention to a short passage in the old 
English law, which clearly decides this case, and which 
for the moment your honor may have forgotten.' 

" Then I fished clown into my pocket and drew forth, 
with a great flourish, an old copy of 'Julius Cassar.' I 
opened it with great dignity, and read the line — familiar 
to every school-boy — ' Omnia Gallia in partes tres divisa 
est.'' ' That decides the case,' said I, throwing the book 
upon the table. ' That clearly acquits the defendant.' 

" With great dignity and solemnity I took my seat. The 
old magistrate was completely nonplussed. He looked at 
me a moment quizzically, and scratched his head; then, 
turning to Pompey, he raised himself to his full height, 
and said: ' Pompey, I know you stole them hams, but by 
the ingenuity of your lawyer, I've got to let you go. Grit 
out ! and if you ever come here again, lawyer or no law- 
yer, you git six months.' " 

Allen gives the characteristic reason why he never 
touches liquor: "Of course, if I drank at all, I should 
have to indulge while stumping my district. Now, you 
just think what would happen to me if, while on a stump- 
ing tour, I should take a few drinks and then attempt to 
say: ' Fellow-citizens of Itawamba, or Oktibbha, or Tish- 
omingo county.' My finish could be easily imagined." 



BENCH AND BAR 13 

Allen and Mills were billed to speak in Connecticut. 

" The posters," says Allen, " always read 
Hon. Roger Q. Mills 
in great big type, ' and others ' in small type. I was' and 
others.' At one town Mills missed his train and I had to 
go alone. The committee came down to the train with 
a brass band and a lot of sashes and lugs. When the 
chairman of the committee found Mills was not there he 
yelled out of the carriage window: 'You needn't play, 
boys, Mills hain't here.' 

" At the hall the presiding officer remarked to chirk 
me up a little: ' The orjence was a-spectin' Mills 'n '11 be 
disappointed, but I'll interjuce ye.' 

'Ladees an' gentlemen, an' standerd barrers of the un- 
tarrified Democracy (cheers), you will all jine me in the 
sense of disappointment we feel at the unavoidable ab- 
sence of the Honnerble Roger Q. Mills (cheers), who wuz 
to hev addressed us to-night. But his place will no doubt 
be ably tilled by the Honnerble — er — what is your 
name?" 

Allen is the only ex-private of the Confederate army 
who has ever been elected and re-elected to Congress. 
And yet Allen has his moments of repining. One of 
these came at a meeting of Confederate veterans, to cel- 
ebrate Robert E. Lee's birthday. There he found him- 
self surrounded by Confederate generals and colonels and 
majors, and not a man who acknowledged a less distinct- 
ive title did he discover, and he naturallv felt lonesome. 

He was called on to give an address, and the topic sug- 
gested was " The Mistakes of the War." This was a big 
subject, and Private Allen at first hesitated, but he speed- 
ily rose to the occasion, and delivered a brief but pithy 
address, as follows : " You have called on me to speak on 
1 The Mistakes of the War.' I do not feel as thouo-h it would 



14 WIT AND HUMOR 

be profitable, or, indeed, necessary, for me to go into the 
subject at length in this presence. When I look around 
upon this brilliant assemblage of generals and colonels 
and majors, it seems to me sufficient to point out one 
of the mistakes of the war, and if it was a fatal mis- 
take I was not responsible for it. I was onty a private." 
There was a pause when the orator sat down, but the as- 
sembled generals and colonels quickly saw the point, and 
he was heartily cheered. 

Althorp, Lord.— What is an archdeacon ? Lord Al- 
thorp one day, on proposing a vote of 400 pounds a year 
for the salary of the Archdeacon of Bengal, was non- 
plussed by the awkward inquisitiveness of Joseph Hume, 
who demanded, "What are the duties of an archdeacon ?" 
He sent one of the subordinate occupants of the Treasury 
Bench to the other house to obtain an answer to the ques- 
tion from one of the bishops. The messenger first met 
with Archbishop Yernon Harcourt, who described an 
archdeacon as " aide-de-camp to the bishop," and then 
with Bishop Copleston, of Llandaff, who said, " The arch- 
deacon is oculus episcopi." Lord Althorp, however, de- 
clared that neither of these explanations would satisfy 
the House. " Go," he said, " and ask the Bishop of Lon- 
don (Blomfield); he is a straightforward man, and will 
give you a plain answer." To the Bishop of London ac- 
cordingly the messenger went, and repeated the question, 
" What is an archdeacon ? " " An archdeacon ? " replied 
the Bishop, in his quick way ; " an archdeacon is an eccle- 
siastical officer who performs archidiaconal functions." 

Anomalies. — An English judge sums up the history 
and present stage of much of our law as "a thing of 
shreds and patches." And this definition explains the 



BENCH AND BAR. 15 

origin of many absurdities — humorously absurd — exist- 
ing in our law of to-day. Law reformers, judicial and 
legislative, should note the following illustrations: 

A. owes B. an undisputed debt of £100. After much 
pressure he comes to B., and, dilating on his own misfort- 
unes in particular and the hard times in general, offers 
him £80 in full satisfaction. B., partly through sym- 
pathy, and partly because having written off the amount 
as a " bad debt " he is only too glad to get anything, ac- 
cedes to these terms. Most people would think that here 
was an end to the matter. It all depends, strangely 
enough, on the way in which the money is paid. If the 
amount is paid in gold or bank-notes, there is no " con- 
sideration " for B. agreeing to accept less than the full 
amount due, and, therefore, if he afterwards repents of 
his bargain, he can sue A. for the remaining £20 in spite 
of his promise to be satisfied with £80. And yet if an 
old knife, a rusty nail, or some other thing, however 
trifling, is " thrown in," then B. is bound by his agreement 
to take the lesser sum in full discharge, for in this humor- 
ously-absurd quibbling way the legal theory of " consid- 
eration " is duly satisfied. 

Let us suppose that a Mr. Smith holds two houses under 
one lease from a Mr. Brown, and assigns one of them to 
a Mr. Eobinson. If Mr. Smith omits to pay his rent, or 
breaks some other covenant in the lease, Mr. Brown — 
the superior landlord — can " distrain " not only on Mr. 
Smith's house, but on poor Mr. Robinson's as well, though 
he may be a model tenant. 

A person buys goods, pays for them, and gets a receipt. 
The tradesman sends in his bill a second time. The pur- 
chaser protests that he has paid, but cannot find the re- 
ceipt. Accordingly, the tradesman brings an action and 
wins. Soon after this the missing receipt is found. And 



16 WIT AND HUMOR 

yet the purchaser cannot by law bring a new action to re- 
cover the amount he has paid as the result of the first 
action, unless he can prove actual fraud on the part of the 
tradesman. And why is this ? Because, according to the 
legal maxim, " It is to the interest of the state that there 
should be some finality to litigation." It certainly is not, 
in this instance, " to the interest " of the purchaser. 

The solemnity and force given to " seals " and the rule 
in Shelley's case are not much less absurd. 

The great remedy for all these evils of our law is less 
regard for ancient precedent and greater regard for com- 
mon sense — more modern instances and fewer ancient 
saws. 

An anomalous freak is exhibited in the record of a case 
tried in a Dublin court. The plaintiff sued for damages 
for injuries sustained by falling into a cellar, the grating 
of which had been left open by the defendant. The plaint- 
iff, in his fall, broke the grating, and for this damage to 
his property the defendant claimed five pounds. Plaint- 
iff's counsel said that the audacity of this demand had 
never been paralleled in his experience, except in one in- 
stance; and this exceptional case he proceeded to relate 
for the benefit of the jury. There lived, he said, at one 
time in the fashionable quarter of that city an eminent 
lawyer, who afterwards came to occupy a position on 
the judicial bench. He was a man of high professional 
attainments, but of testy and irritable temper. His next- 
door neighbor was a retired major, noted for the eccen- 
tricity of his habits. Between the two there was anything 
but friendly feeling, and they did all in their power to 
annoy and harass each other. One night, memorable in 
Ireland as " the night of the great storm," the major's 
chimneys were blown down. Crash they went through 
the roof of the lawyer's house, and thence down through 



BENCH AND BAR. 17 

floor after floor, carrying havoc in their course. The man 
of law was in no good humor as he contemplated the de- 
struction; and what made matters worse was that it was 
the major's chimney that had occasioned the wreck. His 
mind was actively engaged in devising some process by 
which he could get satisfaction from his arch-enemy, when 
a missive arrived from the latter, couched as follows: 

" Send me back my bricks immediately, or I'll put the 
matter into the hands of an attorney." 

Appeals, Eloquent. — Col. John I. Martin, of Mis- 
souri, who won some national fame as ssrgeant-at-arms 
of the Democratic National Convention in 1896, used to 
be a prominent figure at the bar known as the " Four 
Courts" in St. Louis. He once had a client — a colored 
man — who was charged with having stolen a pair of trou- 
sers. The evidence being all in, the Colonel approached 
the jury rail, and, running his fingers through his hair y 
sighing gravely, and assuming a striking attitude, spoke 
in this strain : 

"Gentlemen of the jury: — On the lone shore of the 
Pacific Ocean in a humble cot dwelt the wife of a brave 
sailor. In that land of sunshine and flowers, where the 
voice of the bluejay never is silent and where the golden 
sea laughs in the glad gorgeousness of the god of day, 
this noble woman lived her little round of daily life. At 
even she often stood on the white beach and bent her gaze 
over the blue expanse, as if to catch a glimpse of the white 
sail of her husband's ship. And in the still watches of the 
night, when the dismal cry of the stormy petrel was borne 
on the wings of the wind to that mother's ears, she would 
clasp her babe to her breast and pray God, gentlemen, 
pray God to protect her brave sailor husband, who was 
battling the waves to win from their yeasty froth suste- 
nance for her and her darling child. 



18 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" One night a great storm arose on the sea, and the 
mighty wind, smiting the placid bosom of the Pacific, 
lashed its waters into the fury of the bottomless pit itself. 
Ever and anon from the little window of the cottage shone 
forth a light casting its fitful glare on the storm-ridden 
sea. The night passed in terror for the watching woman, 
and in the morning when the glad sun came forth to smile 
on the work of destruction, there on the white beach lay 
the body of that brave sailor husband, stiff and stark in 
death. Oh, my friends, what a dawn! What a day! " 

The jury was in tears, and Col. Martin dashed away 
several briny drops from his flowing moustache. Then 
he faced the jury and said thunderously: 

" Now, gentlemen, the people claim that my client stole 
these pants. We deny it ! " 

The defendant was given two years in the penitentiary 
by the jury. When the verdict came in, and the jury was 
discharged, a friend of Martin approached him and said: 

" Colonel, that was a pretty good speech you made, but 
what has the Pacific slope, the dismal cry of the stormy 
petrel, and the wings of the wind got to do with this col- 
ored boy and that pair of pants ? " 

" To tell you the truth, it hasn't got anything at all to 
do with them. But don't you know that the first canon 
of forensic oratory, when you are making a defence, is to 
say something that will rivet the attention of the jury ? " 

When Colorado was organized as a territory, Judge 
Hallett was appointed United States judge. Spanish then 
was the language of the Mexican greasers and of nearly 
everybody else. The judge early learned to despise Span- 
ish, and made a rule against its use in court. 

In Trinidad, Colonel Taylor, of the bar, was retained 
for the defence in a case where no defence was possible. 
The place was full of witnesses who had seen the deed 



BENCH AND BAR. 19 

done, whatever it may have been, for that is unimportant. 
The prosecuting attorney put on witness after witness to 
prove the facts. He made a perfect case and demanded 
that full punishment be inflicted. It was a difficult situ- 
ation for Taylor. His client was guilty beyond a doubt ; 
cross-examination of the witnesses could only make that 
fact more distinct, and for that reason he did nothing so 
foolish. The case was altogether Spanish. Criminal, 
witnesses, audience, there were not six words of English 
in the whole outfit. The interpreter had been called on 
for every word which had gone back and forth through- 
out the trial. Taylor arose to make his plea. He sur- 
veyed the cluster of dark faces which filled the shed in 
which the court was sitting. 

"Calalleros" he began, " caballeros deljurado " 

There was a loud whacking of the gavel by Judge Hal- 
lett as soon as he caught the sound of the language which 
he despised so heartily. 

"Mr. Taylor, Mr. Taylor," he shouted, "as a member 
of the bar of this court, you must be aware that all its 
transactions must be conducted in the English language, 
the language of this country. If I thought that you were 
using Spanish maliciously I should punish you soundly 
for such contempt of this court. You will address this 
court of the United States in United States and in no 
other speech, language or dialect." 

" I bow to Your Honor's ruling," continued Taylor, as 
he resumed his plea, but with English and with the as- 
sistance of the interpreter. He told the greaser jury how 
the sight of their proud Castilian lineaments had caused 
him to forget a rule of the court and to address them in 
the sonorous speech of Spain, from which their fore- 
fathers came. He obeyed the judge, but he felt the re- 
straint of having to make his pleading through the as- 



20 WIT AND HUMOR. 

sistance of the interpreter. It was a simple matter which 
he could set right in a few sentences of their own lan- 
guage, but he feared that in English he could not do so 
well, yet he hoped that they would not see a fellow-citi- 
zen punished solely for the reason that his advocate was 
not allowed to address a Spanish jury in their own tongue. 
Harping on this theme, he avoided any discussion of the 
evidence which bore so heavily on his client, and in his 
peroration he paid a glowing tribute to the language of 
Don Quixote and Queen Isabella. This done, he fled 
from the spot and was not seen until court had arisen for 
the day. 

When they next met, the prosecuting attorney wanted 
to know why he had not been on hand to receive con- 
gratulations on the acquittal of his client: 

" They set him free without a stain on his character and 
without leaving their seats, and it was all due to your 
Spanish. Why didn't you wait ? You're the hero of the 
whole population." 

"That's just the trouble," replied Taylor. "I knew 
they'd acquit the thief and then they'd fall all over me 
with their Spanish. I just naturally had to hide. Those 
three words that Judge Hallett choked me off on are all 
the Spanish I ever knew in my life. I couldn't afford to 
be congratulated." 

Maitre Lachand, the famous advocate, was perhaps the 
greatest master of comedy in France, and not a few emi- 
nent actors envied him his marvelous powers of mimicry. 

He was once employed to defend a murderer against 
whom the facts were hopelessly clear. When his pathetic 
appeals and his tears — which were always at call when 
he pleaded before a country jury — failed to touch his 
stolid audience, he resorted to the most impudent pieces 
of trickerj^. 



BENCH AND BAR. 21 

Thrusting his moistened white handkerchief into his 
pocket, he demanded if the jurors were men, if they had 
human hearts, if they could bring themselves to condemn 
a fellow-man like the accused, whom he had credited with 
all sorts of chivalrous, if not saintly, merits. His elo- 
quence was not merely fruitless, but the jury responded 
to it at first with uneasy shuffling, then with biting lips, 
and finally with loud and uncontrolled bursts of laughter. 

Lachand, while flinging about his hands, had intention- 
ally dipped his fingers into the great ink-pot in front of 
him, and as he drew his right hand across his forehead, 
as if in agony of despair at the certain fate of the accused, 
he left upon his brow an enormous black mark like a cres- 
cent moon, and drew other black traces down his cheeks 
as he put his fingers to his eyes to dash away the tears. 

Feigning high moral indignation at their conduct, he 
continued : 

" You are about to decide whether one of your fellow- 
men shall be thrust by you out of the ranks of the living, 
and you choose such a moment for indulging in cruel and 
thoughtless laughter. Is this extravagant mirth a fitting 
mood in which to decide whether a man shall or shall not 
die ? " 

The man was acquitted. 

Elisha Williams, of New York, was somewhat noted 
for his eloquence. On one occasion he made a plea which 
produced a marked effect upon the jury and the court. 
His legal opponent was a mere pettifogger, but shrewd, 
and, as it so happened, succeeded in laying oat the emi- 
nent counselor. When Williams had closed his eloquent 
appeal, the pettifogger said : 

" Gentlemen of the jury, and your honor: I should de- 
spair of the triumph of my client in this case, after the 
eloquent appeal of the learned counsel, but for the fact 



22 WIT AND HUMOR. 

that common law is common sense. ~No man could like 
better the piece which the learned gentleman has spoke 
than what I like the piece. He spoke it good. I've 
heered him give it four times afore — once at Scoclak, in 
a burglary case ; once at Kiak, on a suspicion o' stealing ; 
once at Poughkeepsie, in a murder case; and the next 
time at Kakiak, about the man who was catched counter- 
feiting. Well, he always spoke it good, but this time he's 
really beat himself. But what does it all amount to, gen- 
tlemen of the jury ? That is the question, and you can 
answer it as well as I kin, and better tew ! " 

And so they did, and quickly, by a verdict for the pet- 
tifogger's client. 

An eloquent Milwaukee attorney, defending a hand- 
some young woman accused of stealing from a large un- 
occupied dwelling in the night time, spoke in conclusion : 
" Gentlemen of the jury, I am done. When I gaze with 
enraptured eyes on the matchless beauty of this peerless 
virgin, on whose resplendent charms suspicion never 
dared to breathe — when I behold her radiant in this 
glorious bloom of luscious loveliness, which angelic sweet- 
ness might envy, but could not eclipse — before which 
the star on the brow of the night grows pale, and the 
diamonds of Brazil are dim, and then reflect upon the 
utter madness and folly of supposing that so much beauty 
would expose itself to the terrors of an empty building, 
in the cold, damp, and dead of the night, when innocence 
like hers is hiding itself amid the snowy pillows of repose ; 
gentlemen of the jury, my feelings are too overpowering 
for expression, and I throw her into your arms for pro- 
tection against this foul charge, which the outrageous 
malice of a disappointed scoundrel has invented to blast 
the fair name of this lovely maiden, whose smile shall be 
the reward of the verdict which I know you will give ! " 
The jury acquitted her. 



BENCH AND BAR. 23 

John McS weeny, a famous lawyer, was engaged as 
counsel for the defence in a provincial murder case. The 
case looked hopeless. McSweeny submitted no evidence 
for the defence. Believing that the trial was won, the 
State's attorney made only a few perfunctory remarks 
in conclusion. Then the great leader began in a conver- 
sational tone. No reference was made to the murder, 
but McSweeny drew a vivid picture of a pretty country 
cottage, a loving wife preparing supper, three ruddy- 
faced youngsters looking up the road to see " papa " com- 
ing home to supper. Suddenly the speaker stopped. 
Drawing himself up to his full height, he exclaimed, in a 
tone which startled the whole court-room: — 

" Gentlemen, you must send him home to them ! " 

A roar of applause followed, and one grizzled old juror 
blurted out: — 

" We'll do it, sir; we'll do it ! " 

McSweeny instantly stopped and sat down. The jury 
brought in a verdict of acquittal, without leaving their 
seats. The prisoner, with tears streaming down his 
cheeks, wrung his counsel's hands, and thanked him 
again and again. But between his sobs he managed to 
say: — 

" No other man in the world could have done that ! 
Why, sir, I have no wife or children ! I never even was 
married, you know ! " 

A western attorney relates an interesting experience 
in his professional career: 

" The first case in which I was engaged as counsel was 
Wilgins v. Wiggins. The plaintiff was represented by an 
eloquent, generous-hearted lawyer, who rarely failed to 
carry court and jury; but his early education was de- 
ficient, and he often slipped up on the King's English. 
He opened the case to the jury by saying that his client, 



24 WIT AND HUMOR. 

on a certain day named in the petition, was drunk, and 
that the defendant, taking advantage of his condition, 
cheated him in a horse trade, to his damage one hundred 
dollars. Plaintiff's witnesses testified that, on the day 
named, they saw the plaintiff and defendant together at 
twelve o'clock; that they were both under the influence 
of liquor, the plaintiff particularly, so much so that he 
could not distinguish his own horse ; that at two o'clock 
the same day they saw both parties together again, when 
they acknowledged that a trade had been made in the 
interval, and the plaintiff was then so far gone, from fre- 
quently imbibing during the day, that he could not get 
on his horse. Here the plaintiff's counsel, after proving 
the difference in the value of the horses, rested his case, 
and the defendant, Wiggins, being minus witnesses to 
prove anything to his advantage, I had to close his side 
of the case also. 

I proceeded to argue the case to the jury, and a trying 
time it was. It was my first appearance in court; the 
opposing counsel's reputation as a lawyer made him for- 
midable not only to me, but to all the lawyers of the cir- 
cuit, and the case I considered hopeless. But an idea 
struck me, and I rallied enough courage to urge the posi- 
tion that the plaintiff had failed to show he was drunk at 
the precise time the alleged trade was made; that all he 
had proved was that he was drunk before and after the 
trade, which, I contended, did not affect the contract, and 
that plaintiff would have to prove the drunkenness existed 
at the very time the trade was made, to enable him to 
recover. I considered this position a legal one, and con- 
gratulated myself upon the effect my argument would 
have in controlling the verdict of the jury. But alas, my 
feeling of triumph was short lived ! for my position and 
argument appeared to rouse my old friend on the oppo- 



BENCH AND BAR. 25 

site side, and he proceeded to demolish both in the fol- 
lowing manner: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, the argument of the gentle- 
man on the opposite side reminds me of a position which 
a gentleman took in a case which I once saw tried in Ken- 
tucky. There was two men lived neighbors thar, that 
didn't like each other. One had a very valuable dog; the 
other shot the dog, out of which a lawsuit rose. The case 
came on; the plaintiff's witness swore he saw the defend- 
ant standin' on a little eminence in the woods with a gun 
in his hand; he saw the plaintiff's dog trottin' through 
the woods at the distance of about thirty yards from the 
defendant; he saw the defendant raise the gun; he saw 
the powder flash in the pan; he heard the explosion of 
the gun ; he saw the dog fall, and yet the counsel on the 
opposite side asked, ' "Whar is the man what saw the bul- 
lit hit the dog?' 

"'Now, then, gentlemen of the jury, we have proved 
that the plaintiff was so drunk just before the swap was 
made that he didn't know his own hoss, and that just 
after the swap was made he was so drunk he couldn't git 
on his own hoss, and yet the gentleman on the opposite 
side insists that we must prove that he was drunk at the 
very time the swap was made, or in other words he asks 
' Whar is the man that saw the bullit hit the dog? ' 

" The jury thought I was asking too much, and gave a 
verdict for the plaintiff." 

An attorney blessed with a keen sense of the ludicrous 
can often extract a verdict from an appreciative jury by 
the aid even of a single joke. The famous Sergeant 
"Wilkins was once defending a breach of promise case, 
when the counsel for the plaintiff made a most eloquent 
appeal for his suffering and injured client, closing with 
the words, "And, gentlemen, she is an orphan!" 



26 WIT AND HUMOR. 

The effect of this was so successful that several of the 
intelligent jury gave convincing signs to the initiated of 
unpleasantly sentimental damages against the defendant. 
But Wilkins was equal to the occasion. When he rose 
to his feet, he laid his hand upon a waistcoat from be- 
neath which, to him, the toes of his well-blacked Welling- 
tons were quite invisible, and, in a voice husky with good 
living and good humor, began his speech with, " Gentle- 
men of the jury, I also am an orphan !" The effect was 
irresistible, and the sentimental counsel was laughed out 
of court. 

When Judge McCallum, of Iowa, was practicing at the 
bar, one of his first cases was before a justice who was 
extremely harsh with criminals. The weakness of the 
old Puritan was his veneration for veterans of the war. 
McCallum had fought four years. His client was a thief. 

" The only thing I can do for you," said McCallum, " is 
to implore the mercy of the court. When you go on the 
stand tell the whole truth." 

The man had stolen a cow, killed it, sold the hide and 
taken the beef home to his family, which was really suf- 
fering for the necessaries of life. 

" Now, your honor," said McCallum, " the defence has 
no witnesses. My client is guilty. He has hid nothing 
from this court." Then turning to the prisoner, as if the 
fact had nearly escaped him, McCallum said: 

" By the way, you were a soldier in the late war, were 
you not ? " 

"Yes, sir." 

« Weren't you at Gettysburg ? " 

" Yes, sir." 

" So was I. And you were in other historic battles, 
fighting for your country, while your wife and family 
suffered from want at home ? " 

"Yes, sir." 



BENCH AND BAR. 27 

The prosecution at this point saw the way the case was 
drifting, and attempted to ridicule the " old soldier " de- 
fence, as the prosecuting attorney named it. The effect 
on the old justice was to arouse all his loyalty and indig- 
nation : 

"Enough of this," said he, bringing his fist down hard 
on the desk in front of him. " No soldier who has shed 
his best blood for his country, not even if he be a crim- 
inal, can be reviled in my presence. The prisoner is 
discharged. And, sir, when you are suffering for the nec- 
essaries of life again, come to me." 

The joke was too good to keep. McCallum told the 
justice one day that the old soldier was an ex-Confederate, 
but he never again practiced in that court. 

The following impromptu verse on one of Lord- Advo- 
cate Campbell's eloquent arguments in the Court of Ses- 
sions is a bright bit of portraiture : 

He clenched his pamphlets in his fist, 

He quoted and he hinted, 
Till in a declamation mist, 

His argument he tint it; 
He gaped for't, he graped for't, 

He fand it was awa', man; 
But what his common sense came short, 

He eked it out wf law, man. 

" Gentlemen of the jury," said a down-east attorney r 
" it is with feelings of no ordinary emotion that I rise to 
defend my injured client from the attacks which have 
been made against his hitherto unapproachable character. 
I feel, gentlemen, that although I am a great deal smarter 
than any of you, even the judge himself, yet I am utterly 
unable to present this case in that magnanimous and heart- 
rending light which its importance demands ; but I trust,, 
gentlemen, that whatever I may lack in presenting it will 
be at once supplied by your own natural good sense and 
discernment. 



28 WIT AND HUMOR 

" The counsel for the prosecution will undoubtedly at- 
tempt to heave dust into your eyes. He will tell you that 
his client is pre-eminently a man of function, and one who 
would scorn to bring an action for the mere gratification 
of a personal curiosity. But, gentlemen, let me cautionate 
you how to rely on such specious reasoning like this. I 
myself apprehend that if you could look into that man's 
heart, you would see there such a picture of moral turpi- 
tude and base ingratitude as never before exhibited since 
the Niagara Fall. 

" Now, gentlemen, I wish to reason with you for a few 
moments, and see if I can't warp your judgments into 
bringing in a verdict for my unfortunate client, and then 
I will fetch my argument to a close. Here we have a 
poor man with a numerous wife and child, fetched up and 
arranged before an intelligent jury, charged with hook- 
ing — yes, ignominiously hooking — Rye quarts of hard 
cider. You, gentlemen, have been in the same predica- 
ment and know how to feel for my unfortunate client; 
and I trust, gentlemen, that you will not allow the gush- 
ings of your sympathizing natures to be squenched by the 
surreptitious arguments of my ignorant opponent on the 
other side. 

" Now, gentlemen, in the beautiful language of Shakes- 
peare, if you are sure of the guilt of the prisoner, it is 
your duty to lean on the side of justice and bring him in 
innocent." 

Ashman, William N.— Judge Ashman, of Philadel- 
phia — a jurist of rare ability, — possesses a humor whose 
charming quality appears in the following quotation from 
his response to the toast, The Bar, delivered at the ban- 
quet of the Pennsylvania Bar Association, in July, 1895 : 

Mr. Toast-Master and Gentlemen of the Bar Associa- 



BENCH AND BAR. 29 

cion : I am glad for one that the advent of this Associa- 
tion has made this toast possible. We have a great many 
bars in Pennsylvania — and I am not alluding to the bars 
which are recognized by the Brooks License Law, with 
which some of my friends here are familiar — but we 
have now, and for the first time, a Bar. And in this 
presence, with these august representatives of the Bar of 
Pennsylvania, I have in my diffidence to call to my aid a 
little piece of philosophy, very homely, which has stood / 
me in tolerably good stead on some lesser occasions. A 
young man was once desirous to call upon a young lady 
with whom he had a somewhat slight acquaintance; and, 
like the speaker, he was cursed with a certain amount of 
timidity which it was very difficult to overcome; and he 
hesitated, because he feared that the young lady might 
not receive him with the utmost affability. He happened 
to speak of his dilemma to a society lady, an elderly lady, 
who said to him at once, " Pay that visit by all means, 
you will be certain to confer a pleasure upon that young 
lady. If she is not particularly pleased to see you when 
you come in, she will be pleased to see you go out." 
(Laughter and applause.) And it is in this left-handed 
sort of way that I shall try to give pleasure. I am per- 
fectly conscious of the fact that if you do not care to see 
me get up, you will be delighted to see me sit down. 
(Applause.) 

I have sometimes tried to think, gentlemen, in what / 
position the Bar looks at its best. There are some occa- 
sions on which it does not appear to the best advantage. 
Sometimes, I am sorry to say, it is at a little disadvantage, 
even in its chosen forum — the court-room. You all know 
of the rustic visitor to the City of New York, who was 
taken by a legal friend of his to visit the Court of Quarter 
Sessions. The stranger looked around upon the auditory, 



30 WIT AND HUMOR 

and he turned and said finally, " Well, I always supposed 
that New York was a wicked city, I have often been 
told so, but I never thought it was quite as wicked as it 
is. I never in my life before saw, in so contracted a 
space, such a crowd of hardened criminals." And the 
friend said to him, a Yes, but those are not the criminals 
you are looking at, those are the lawyers." (Applause.) 
And gentlemen, I am not perfectly certain that the Bar 
always shows to the best advantage at a dinner. One 
reason, I suppose, is that the lawyers in Philadelphia at 
least are ill-paid and ill-fed. We say of a young lawyer, 
not that he is practicing law, but that he has been ad- 
mitted to the Bar and is now practicing economy. (Ap- 
plause.) Well, when one of these young gentlemen does 
get a square meal, why he sometimes becomes a little be- 
wildered under the circumstances. (Applause.) 

It is not always, however, those lawyers either who 
are so ill-fed that appear in this condition at the dinner 
table. I have actually seen, in the City of Philadelphia, 
a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, a hard common- 
sense, matter-of-fact and matter-of-law lawyer, who never 
boasted that he had any imagination whatever, and whose 
friends never claimed that he had either (Laughter), a 
conscientious Judge, too, and a hard-working Judge, be- 
cause he does not sit simply as a judge in his court, but 
he also acts as a thirteenth juror in every case tried be- 
fore him — (Applause) — well, I have seen him stand at 
a public dinner — that is, when he was able to stand — 
(Applause) and draw a glowing picture of the glories of 
that good time coming when the science of special plead- 
ing would have become a myth, when lawyers would 
bring in their declaration on a sheet of note paper, when 
indictments for perjury would be drawn up on an envel- 
ope, when every man would be his own lawyer, and when 
law would be cheap, even if it did not happen to be good. 



BENCH AND BAR 31 

Now, I am not perfectly sure that that gentleman is not 
present here to-night. He told me, some few days ago, 
that he would come here if I would ; and I afterwards 
discovered that he said exactly the same thing to about 
ten other men ; so that he is under some pledges, at least, 
to be present. It is very likely, indeed, that if he should 
speak to-night, he will talk to you somewhat in the same 
strain; I hope you will listen to him with interest; he 
will be sure to be entertaining, if he is not instructive. 
(Applause.) 

I have not any particular feeling on this subject, cer- 
tainly no personal feeling. I recognize this fact dis- 
tinctly — that there is room for a revision in the Courts 
of Common Pleas. I am not very much afraid, however, 
about the revision that might be applied to the Orphan's 
Court. A man that would undertake to revise our code 
of procedure would find it a very difficult matter, for the 
simple reason that we have not any code of procedure in 
that court. Most of the lawyers who come into the Or- 
phan's Court of Philadelphia — well, they are a good 
deal like the Irishman who descanted upon the wrongs 
of Ireland, and, after he talked for an hour or so upon 
the outrages committed by the English upon that un- 
happy country, somebody in the audience got up and said, 
" What do your people want, anyhow ? " " Want ? " said 
the Irishman, " Why, we do not know what we want, 
but, be jabbers, we are bound to have it all the same." 
(Applause.) That is a good deal the way with the mem- 
bers of the Bar who come into our court. One gentle- 
man presents a petition, and then another one presents 
an affidavit, and another one presents a paper, which is 
neither a petition nor an affidavit, and we sit down and 
read over the papers, and then we draw up a decree grant- 
ing them what we think they want, but which they do 



32 WIT AND HUMOR. 

not seem to know themselves. (Applause.) I do not 
think you could reform very much on that code of pro- 
cedure. (Laughter.) 

I have no objection to these projected reforms. For 
my part, when I come to think about this new judicial 
dress, if you choose, if it will add new horror to death in 
the case of criminals in the Oyer and Terminer to have 
the judges sentence them in the red gown or black gown, 
by all means let the judges wear such a gown, a night- 
gown, if you choose, I do not care. (Applause.) 

Assignments of Error.— In the United States Court 
for the Western District of New York, a seizure was made 
of one barrel of whiskey, two horses, and other property. 
The owner contested the seizure, a trial was had, and a 
verdict rendered for the Government. The owner entered 
an appeal, and filed an "Assignment of Error:" 

" Afterwards, to wit, on the day of , in the 

same town, before one of the Justices of the Court 

of the United States at , comes the said one barrel of 

whiskey, two horses, and other property, claimant, and 

plaintiff in error, by , his attorney, and say," etc. 

The document concludes: 

" And the said one barrel of whiskey, two horses and 

other property, claimant, prays that the judgment 

aforesaid may be reversed." 

Referring to the haphazard assignments of error in 
Weiting v. Nissley, 13 Pa. 655, Chief Justice Gibson sa} r s: 

" The record in this case, as in most others, has excep- 
tions, like the pockets of a billiard table, to catch lucky 
chances from the random strokes of the players ; but, as 
they have caught nothing in this instance, it is unneces- 
sary to enter into a particular investigation of them." 

In Rogers v. Walker, 6 Fa. 375, he pronounces the ex- 



BENCH AND BAR. 33 

ceptions as " A reticulated web to catch the crumbs of 
the cause, and as they contain no point or principle of 
particular importance, they are dismissed without further 
remark." 

The learned and facetious Chief Justice Bleckley, of 
Georgia, thus tenderly touches an associate whose decision 
in a lower court is under review: 

" Before the translation of our brother Lumpkin to this 
bench, though his judicial accuracy was remarkable, he 
shared in the fallibility which is inherent in all courts 
except those of last resort. In some rare instances he 
committed error, and the very last of his errors is now 
before us for correction." Broome v. Davis. 87 Ga. 586. 

Mr. Oswald, who had the reputation of being the hard- 
est fighter at the English bar, was arguing a case in the- 
Court of Appeals at great length. The court had inti- 
mated pretty clearly that it had heard enough, but Oswald, 
treating these intimations in his usual manner, went on 
raising point after point. 

"Really," at last one of the justices remonstrated,, 
"really, Mr. Oswald, if you intend to rely on these points 
you should have raised them in the court below." 

" So I did, my lord," replied Oswald, " but their lord- 
ships stopped me." 

"They stopped you, did they?" inquired Lord Esher, 
eagerly, " How did they do it ? " 

The late Chief Justice Sharswood, of Pennsylvania^ 
said, in Pennsylvania Canal Go. v. Bentley: " This contro- 
versy is about a mule. Some great principles are sup- 
posed to be involved which it is necessary the court of 
last resort should decide. We often hear this alleged in 
cases in which it must be evident that the expenses will 
exceed the amount in dispute, or at least one would think 
3 



34 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the play not worth the candle. This ardent attachment 
to principle seems to be a marked characteristic of the 
. . . bar of this state, and would be highly laudable 
if it were not accompanied with some counterbalancing 
public evils ; such as the great increase of the business of 
this court and the harassing of suitors. There were no 
less than thirteen points presented in writing to the court 
below, and the learned judge w r as required to navigate 
through all the shoals and narrows of negligence and 
evidence of negligence ; of contributory negligence and 
the onus probandi. He did so . with remark- 

able skill; and the argument of plaintiffs in error has 
failed to convince us that he was guilty of a single error." 

" Some courts live by correcting the errors of others 
and adhering to their own. On these terms courts of 
final review hold their existence, or those of them which 
are strictly and exclusively courts of review, without any 
original jurisdiction, and with no direct function but to 
find fault or see that none can be found. With these ex- 
alted tribunals who live only to judge the judges, the rule 
of stare decisis is not only a canon of public good, but a 
law of self-preservation. At the peril of their lives they 
-must discover error abroad and be discreetly blind to its 
•commission at home. Were they as ready to correct 
themselves, they could no longer speak as absolute oracles 
of legal truth; the reason for their existence would dis- 
appear, and their destruction would speedily supervene. 
Nevertheless, without serious detriment to the public or 
peril to themselves, they can and do admit now and then, 
with cautious reserve, that they have made a mistake. 
Their rigid dogma of infallibility allows of this much re- 
laxation in favor of truth unwittingly forsaken. Indeed, 
reversion to truth in some rare instances is highly neces- 
sary to their permanent well-being. Though it is a tern- 



BENCH AND BAR. 35 

poraiy degradation from the type of judicial perfection, 
it has to be endured to keep the type itself respectable. 
Minor errors, even if quite obvious, or important errors if 
their existence be fairly doubtful, may be adhered to and 
repeated indefinitely ; but the only treatment for a great 
and glaring error affecting the current administration of 
justice in all courts of original jurisdiction, is to correct 
it. When an error of this magnitude and which moves 
in so wide an orbit competes with truth in the straggle 
for existence, the maxim for a supreme court, supreme in 
the majesty of duty as well as in the majesty of power, 
is not stare decisis, but fiat justitia ruat coelum." — Chief 
Justice Bleckley, in Ellison v. Georgia Railroad, 87 Ga. 
696. 

" The bill of exceptions recites that counsel for plaintiff 
in error proceeded to reply to the argument in favor of 
the nonsuit, but was, almost at the outset, interrupted by 
the court, who stated that it was unnecessary for counsel 
for the plaintiff to take up the time of the court, as the 
court was ' dead-head' against him, and the court then 
passed the order. ' We know it is frequently the habit of 
counsel to make the speech long because the case is weak, 
but we agree with the circuit judge in thinking it need- 
less to do so. That the judicial head was in the mortuary 
state described by its possessor was a necessary result of 
the evidence." — Bleckley, C. J., in Sparks v. E. T., V. <& 
G. By., 82 Ga. 159. 

Bacon, Lord. — When Sir Edward Coke, presuming 
on his superior position as attorney-general, said in court, 
" Mr. Bacon, if you have any tooth against me, pluck it 
out, for it will do you more hurt than all the teeth in 
your head will do you good," Bacon replied: " Mr. Attor- 
ney, I respect you, I fear you not; and the less you speak 
of your own greatness, the more I will think of it." 



36 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Bacon, in his advice to Justice Hutton, says: "You 
should be a light to jurors to open their eyes, but not a 
guide to lead them by their noses." 

Barbour, James.— Old Judge Barbour, of Virginia, 
after enjoying the highest honors, and retiring to private 
life, was prevailed upon to be a candidate for a local 
office. The opposition trotted out an illiterate, rough- 
and-tumble politician, named Bill Maples, against the old 
man. In accordance with the strict rules of conducting 
a political campaign in those days, Barbour had to take 
the stump with Maples. But Maples could always beat 
him in abusive harangues. The final speech of the cam- 
paign, made by Maples, was abusive beyond all prece- 
dent. Barbour's cutting reply is a rich bit of forensic 
ore: 

" Fellow Citizens : When I was a young man, now 
nearly forty years ago, your grandfathers sent me as their 
representative for four terms to the House of Delegates, 
and I was chosen Speaker of that body. At a subsequent 
period I was twice elected Governor of Yirginia. After- 
wards, and for ten years, I represented this renowned 
commonwealth in the Senate of the United States, where 
I was the confidant, and perhaps I may say the peer, of 
Macon, King, Gaillard, Pinckney, Van Buren. Mr. John 
Quincy Adams subsequently conferred upon me a place 
in his cabinet, and for three years I shared his counsels 
in conjunction with Clay, Wirt and McLean. I was then 
appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipoten- 
tiary to the court of St. James, where it became my duty 
to conduct negotiations with the conqueror of Napoleon. 
Judge then, fellow-citizens, of the ineffable disgust I feel, 
after such a career, and in my declining years, at finding 
myself here to-day, engaged in a low, pitiful country 



BENCH AND BAR. 37 

contest with such a disagreeable little cuss as Bill 

Maples." 



Bates, Edward. — Judge Bates, of Missouri, was a 
monomaniac on the subject of tax titles, and, while on the 
bench of the Land Court, resorted to every conceivable 
plan to overthrow a title predicated upon a tax sale. In 
an action of ejectment in his court, the plaintiff relied 
upon a tax title; and when he introduced his deed in evi- 
dence, the judge scrutinized it very closely, and found the 
land described as " N. E. qr. of S. E. qr. of S. 4, T. 40; " 
and the following colloquy took place : 

" Mr. Counsel, what do the letters N. E. in this deed 
stand for ? " 

" North East, if your honor please." 

"North East, North East? What evidence is there 
before the court to show that they mean any such thing ? " 

"The letters N. E. are usually used by surveyors to 
designate the points of the compass." 

" How is this court to know that they were not intended 
to represent 4 New England ' or * New Edition,' or < Noth- 
ing Extra,' or any other words to which the initials may 
be applicable ? " 

" The point raised by your honor is new, and I am not 
prepared to give any additional explanation." 

" The objection to the introduction of the deed is sus- 
tained, upon the ground of uncertainty in the description 
of the premises. Plaintiff nonsuited." 

Benjamin, Judah P. — Benjamin, attorney-general 
of the Southern Confederacy, and afterward eminent as 
a member of the English bar, possessed great power in 
applying " the theory of the law to daily practice." The 
following story illustrates his shrewdness and convincing 
logic : 

He was counsel for a plaintiff who owned a cargo of 



38 WIT AND HUMOR 

cotton and claimed damages against a Liverpool ware- 
houseman, who had accepted it to be warehoused at a 
stipulated rent. The warehouse, it was said, was old, and 
the walls and roof gave way, in consequence of which the 
cotton was damaged. 

The defendant spared no expense in procuring wit- 
nesses of the class known as " experts," upon whose evi- 
dence, rightly or wrongly, so many caustic remarks have 
been made by judges and others. 

One after another these men came into the box, with 
the full confidence of vast experience — architects, build- 
ers, engineers, warehousemen, and all who could assist in 
demonstrating to the jury that no stronger or more per- 
fect warehouse had ever been constructed. 

At last, by way of climax, came a gentleman whose 
great prestige and combined experience as both architect 
and engineer eclipsed that of all who had preceded him. 
He gave his evidence in that calm and measured tone 
which demands acquiescence from all who hear it, and 
explained the impossibility of the accident having oc- 
curred in consequence of any improper construction or 
want of repair. 

"While this was going on, Benjamin sat taking a note 
in solemn gravity ; then he rose to cross-examine the wit- 
ness. 

" I think, sir, you said you had had great experience in 
the building of warehouses ? " 

" Yes." 

"And that you have carefully considered the causes 
which lead to their weakness ? " 

" Certainly." 

"And you have applied those considerations to the 
present case ? " 

" I have done so." 



BENCH AND BAR. 

" Then will you kindly answer me one more question ? 
Why did that warehouse fall ? " 

The witness paused, and Benjamin, with a pleasant 
twinkle in his eye, sat down with almost a bump on his 
seat. 

The pause continued, and the effect of it was so strik- 
ing that jurymen, bystanders and all could not resist a 
hearty laugh, which terribly diminished the effect of a 
long and reasoned reply which the expert finally went on 
to give. 

" Thank you," said Benjamin. " I have no more ques- 
tions with which to trouble you." 

The result was irresistible, and no ingenuity on the 
part of the learned counsel for the defendant could re- 
trieve the lost ground. The verdict was for the plaintiff. 

Benton, Thomas H. — In his early professional ca- 
reer, Benton practiced law in Tennessee. Subsequently 
he represented Missouri in the United States Senate, at- 
taining eminence and fame as an orator. His oratory, 
especially on the stump, had a humorous quality that 
caught the popular taste. 

Benton was once delivering a speech, the burden of 
which was abuse of the New York Tribune and Horace 
Greeley, who had incurred his particular displeasure. He 
had described the great "Whig journalist as " the whitest 
man in the world. He wears a white hat, he wears a 
white coat, his hair is white, his skin is white, and I give 
it to you as my candid opinion that his liver is of the 
same color." 

Having finally disposed of Mr. Greeley to his satisfac- 
tion, he continued, " Fellow-citizens, the assistant editor 
of the Tribune is Robinson — Kichelieu Robinson. He 
is an Irishman, an Orange Irishman, a red-haired Irish- 



40 WIT AND HUMOR. 

man! " At this point the old campaigner cast his eye 
over his audience and observed that there was a liberal 
sprinkling of red heads, both male and female. With the 
veteran's instinct, he realized in a moment the mistake 
his hurried and heedless invective had perpetrated. It 
must be corrected at once ; but he was equal to the emer- 
gency. With an impressive pause, and an equally im- 
pressive wave of his hand, he resumed as if continuing 
the original thread of his discourse. 

" Fellow-citizens," said he, " when I say that Eobinson 
is a red-headed Irishman, I mean no disrespect to persons 
whose hair is of that color. I have been a close observer 
of men and affairs for forty years, and I can on my verac- 
ity declare that I never knew a red-haired man who was 
not an honest man, nor a red-haired woman who was not 
a virtuous woman, and I give it as my candid opinion that 
had it not been for Robinson's red hair he would have 
been hanged long ago ! " 

Black, Jeremiah S. — Chief Justice Black, of Penn- 
sylvania, in reviewing a case which came up from the 
court of his old friend, Judge Moses Hampton, remarked 
that " Surely Moses must have been wandering in the 
wilderness when he made his decision," and sent the case 
back to the lower court. Judge Hampton, on its second 
trial, took occasion to remark that although he would 
have to submit to the higher authority, yet he still thought 
he was right, " in spite of the Lamentations of Jeremiah." 

Black for a long time wore a black wig. On one oc- 
casion, having donned a new one, Senator Bayard, of 
Delaware, met him: 

" Why, Black, how young you look ! You are not so 
gray as I am, and you must be twenty years older." 

"Humph!" replied the judge; "good reason: your 
hair comes by descent, mine by purchase." 



BENCH AND BAR. 41 

Bleckley, L. E. — The rare ability, fine literary at- 
tainments, charming humor and trenchant wit of the late 
Chief Justice Bleckley, of Georgia, place him easily in the 
front rank of the great men of the south. 

The advice of Lord Mansfield to an old army officer, 
appointed governor of a West India island, — "Decide 
promptly, but never give any reasons for your decisions. 
Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure 
to be wrong," — is illustrated by Bleckley in Lee v. Porter, 
63 Ga. 346: 

" It not infrequently happens that a judgment is af- 
firmed upon a theory of the case which did not occur to 
the court that rendered it, or which did occur and was 
expressly repudiated. The human mind is so constituted 
that in many instances it finds the truth when wholly un- 
able to find the way that leads to it: 

' The pupil of impulse, it forc'd him along, 
His conduct still right, with his argument wrong: 
Still aiming at honor, yet fearing to roam. 
The coachman was tipsy, the chariot drove home.' " 

" There are so many Hawks in the facts in this case 
that the air is a little darkened." Hawks v. Hawks, 64 
Ga. 239. 

There is in the following extract from his opinion in 
MeNaught v. Anderson, 78 Ga. 503, an amusing exposi- 
tion of the legal rights of the wife as well as her domes- 
tic privileges in the matter of self-support : 

" The legal unity of husband and wife has, in Georgia, 
for the most purposes, been dissolved, and a legal duality 
established. A w T ife is a wife, not a husband, as she was 
formerly. Legislative chemistry has analyzed the conju- 
gal unit, and it is no longer treated as an element, but as 
a compound. A husband can make a gift to his wife, al- 



42 WIT AND HUMOR. 

though she lives in the house with him, and attends to 
her household duties, as easily as he can make a present 
to his neighbor's wife. This puts her on an equality with 
other ladies and looks like progress. Under the new order 
of things, when he induces her to enter into the business 
of keeping boarders and promises to let her have all the 
proceeds, he is allowed to keep his promise if she keeps 
the boarders. It would seem that the law ought to tol- 
erate him in being faithful to his word in such a matter, 
even though he has pledged it only to his wife, and we 
think it does." 

In LuJcens v. Ford, 87 Ga. 542, the chief justice paints 
in glowing colors the lumbering records of small litiga- 
tion: 

" In the ornithology of litigation this case is a tomtit 
furnished with a garb of feathers ample enough for a tur- 
key. Measured by the verdict, its tiny body has only the 
bulk of $25, but it struts with a display of record expanded 
into 83 pages of manuscript. It seems to us that a more con- 
tracted plumage might serve for a small bird, but perhaps 
we are mistaken. In every forensic season we have a con- 
siderable flock of such cases, to be stripped and dissected 
for the cabinets of jurisprudence. We endeavor to pick 
our overfl. edged poultry with judicial assiduity and pa- 
tience." 

"Non-suit is a process of legal mechanics; the case is 
chopped off. Only in a clear, gross case is this mechan- 
ical treatment proper. When there is any doubt another 
method is to be used — a method involving a sort of men- 
tal chemistry; and the chemists of the law are the jury. 
They are supposed to be able to examine every molecule 
of the evidence, and to feel every shock and tremor of its- 
probative force." Victors v. A.*<& W. E. B., 64 Ga. 308. 



BENCH AND BAR. £& 

"Anyone who seriously doubts the correctness of this 
ruling may readily solve his doubts by studying law." 
Dutton v. State, 92 Ga. 15. 

Speaking of egotism, Bleckley says: "No matter how 
well introduced by others, I always bring myself before 
my audience, if I have auy. Yery often I have none, and 
then I don't speak, except to myself. I take myself 
along all the time, and my habit is to talk about myself 
as freely as about other people, and quite as favorably ; 
if any difference, more so. In short, I am an egotist. I 
consider it a great blessing to be myself, a blessing which 
I appreciate the more, the more I think of the great risk 
I must have run of being somebody else. Of the fifty- 
five millions of other people in the United States I might 
have been any one. Indeed the possibilities were much 
wider; I might have been any one of the fifteen hundred 
millions that inhabit the earth. Nor does this even begin 
to exhaust the contingencies to which I was subject; I 
might have been any one of the countless myriads that 
ever did or ever will live. I might perchance have been 
one of the unimaginable number of animals or plants or 
minerals — a grain of sand or a mote in the atmosphere. 
I might have been one of the units, any one of the atoms, 
of derivative existence, with my place at any point in the 
immensities, my time at any moment of the eternities. 
On the other hand, I might not have been at all." 

The most touching decision in 64, Georgia Reports is the 
following by Bleckley: 

In the Matter of Rest. 

" 1. Rest for hand and brow and breast, 

For fingers, heart and brain! 
Rest and peace! a long release 

From labor and from pain; 
Pain of doubt, fatigue, despair — 
Pain of darkness everywhere, 

And seeking light in vain! 



44 WIT AND HUMOR. 

"2. Peace and rest! Are they the best 

For mortals here below ? 
Is soft repose from work and woes 

A bliss for men to know ? 
Bliss of time is bliss of toil ; 
No bliss but this, from sun and soil, 

Does God permit to grow." 

The reporter appends the following explanation: "Jus- 
tice Bleckley having resigned, at the conclusion of his 
last opinion, read from the bench the above exquisite 
little poem, which was ordered spread upon the minutes 
by the court. It constitutes a fit close to the judicial 
career of one whose opinions in these reports show him 
not only to have been the profound lawyer, but also the 
accomplished scholar." 

Bond. — During a session of the Circuit Court at 
Lynchburg, Virginia, an Irishman was indicted for stab- 
bing another on the canal, and the only witness, Dennis 
O'Brien, was required to enter into a bond for his ap- 
pearance at the next term of court. The bond was read 
to him in the usual form: 

" You acknowledge yourself indebted to the common- 
wealth of Yirginia in the sum of five hundred dollars." 

" I don't owe her a cint, sir." 

As soon as the clerk recovered from his amusement at 
the answer, he explained the meaning of the form, and 
then read it over again. 

" I tell ye I don't owe her a cint. It's more money nor 
I ever saw, nor my father before me." 

At this stage of the matter a brother of Dennis inter- 
fered, and said : 

" Ye must jest say it, Dinnis; it's ony one of the forms 
of the law." 

" But I won't. I'm a dacent, honest man, what pays 
my debts, and I'll spake the thruth, and the divil may 



BENCH AND BAR. 45 

drink all my whiskey for a month if I say I owe any- 
body a cint. Now chate me if you can." 

Dennis refused to say it, but he promised to come to 
court at the next term and tell all he knew about the 
murder. 

Bradley, Joseph P. — The late Justice Bradley, of 
the Supreme Court of the United States, in a charmingly 
dramatic way, used to relate this story: "I was walking 
one morning, rather plainly dressed, near the City Hall, 
when a man came up and said, ' Do you live in the Dis- 
trict ? ' I said ' Yes.' ■ Own property in the District ? ' 
' Yes, I do ; but what's that to you ? ' ' Well,' he said, ' I 
want you to come with me.' ' What for ? ' ' I want you 
to serve on a jury; they are short of a juryman in there, 
and I'm sent out to get one.' 'How long will it take?' 
'I don't know,' said he; 'it may take two or three days.' 
'But I haven't time, I'm busy.' ' Oh, they all say that, 
but it doesn't go with me ; I don't accept any such ex- 
cuse as that.' So I walked along a little way toward the 
building, as if I were going in. ' But I've business to at- 
tend to,' said I. ' Oh, well, your business can wait.' ' No, 
it can't — I've got to go to the Capitol; I've important 
things to attend to there.' At first I had thought I would 
let him take me in, and then I would tip the wink to the 
judge; but I concluded I wouldn't go so far as that, so I 
said to him: 'Are you in the habit of putting Justices of 
the Supreme Court of the United States in your jury- 
boxes? ' ' Why, are you a Justice of the Supreme Court? ' 
'Yes,' said I. 'What name?' 'Bradley,' said I; and 
after I had told him he concluded to let me go." 

Soon after rooms in the new post-office building at 
Philadelphia were ready for the United States courts, 
Justice Bradley went to that city to hold court. Upon 



4(3 WIT AND HUMOR. 

entering the building, one of the janitors, taking him for 
a casual visitor, assumed to show him over the various 
floors. The stranger appeared to be interested in what 
he was permitted to see. When they had come to a finely- 
furnished room just off from the court-room, he inquired 
of the guide what room it was. "Oh, this is for the 
judges; but they haven't arrived yet." 

Laying aside his umbrella, and taking off his hat and 
coat, he quietly remarked: 

•' One of them has." 

Brady, James T.— Brady was admitted to the New 
York bar in 1836; and for more than thirty years was 
one of its great leaders. " His father," says a writer of 
that city, "believed that a science which distinguishes 
between right and wrong; which teaches to establish the 
one, and prevent, punish or redress the other; which em- 
ploys in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and 
exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart, 
should be thoroughly studied by all who desire a finished 
and liberal education. The elder Brady taught his son 
that laborious study and diligent observation of the world 
are both indispensable to the lawyer. 

"' James,' said he, one day, 'the study of law is like 
scaling the Alps — you must adopt the indomitable en- 
ergy of Hannibal, and your ascent will be easy. Of all 
things beware of half knowledge — it begets pedantry 
and conceit; it is what the poet meant when he said, "A 
little learning is a dangerous thing." Make your learn- 
ing practical, for a bookworm is a mere driveler — a gos- 
samer. There is a deal of legal learning that is dry, cold, 
dark, revolting ; but it is an old feudal castle, in perfect 
preservation, which the legal architect who aspires to the 
first honors of his profession will delight to explore, and 



BENCH AND BAR. 47 

learn all the uses to which the various parts are to be 
put, and thus he will better understand and relish the 
progressive improvements of the science in modern times.' 
" With such familiar conversation as this, the elder 
Brady implanted in the mind of his son the great princi- 
ples of jurisprudence." 

When Brady first opened an office in New York he 
took a basement room, previously occupied by a cobbler. 
He was annoyed by the previous occupant's callers, and 
irritated that he had few of his own. One day an Irish- 
man entered. 

" The cobbler's gone, I see." 

" I should think he has," tartly responded Brady. 

" And what do ye sell ? " looking at the solitary table 
a.nd a few law books. 

"Blockheads." 

" Be gorra," said the Irishman, " ye must be doing a 
mighty fine business — ye've only one left." 

Anecdotes that fell from Brady's lips derived peculiar 
humor from his way of telling them, which could neither 
be imitated nor described. He entered heartily into the 
fun of what he was relating, and laughed as loud as the 

loudest. " There is counselor M ," he said, referring 

good-humoredly to an advocate of considerable distinc- 
tion, " quite a brilliant jury-lawyer, and a pretty strong 
man, but with some peculiarities. Did any of you ever 
notice his queer parentheses in summing up ? For in- 
stance : If he desires to allude to any one connected with 
the case in terms of condemnation, you'll always hear 
him begin in this fashion: 

" ' Then, gentlemen of the jury, there is the defendant 
(God help him ! ),' or ' Observe, gentlemen, the character 
of the witnesses marshaled here to crush us; and, first 



48 WIT AND HUMOR 

and foremost, we have John Smith (God help him!)/ 
etc. 

" Now, I think," pursued Brady, with a merry twinkle, 

"that if Mr. M would only direct his appeals wber« 

he has some weight and influence, he might have <t rea- 
sonable expectation of success." 

Brady was very fond of the ready natural wit of his 
countrymen. One day, speaking of this i«> a friend, he 
said, " I'll just show you a sample. J'll speak to any of 
these men at work; and you'll see that I will get my an- 
swer." Stepping up to the men who were at work on a 
cellar near by, he spoke to them cheerfully. " Good day, 
good day to you, boys. That looks like hard work for 
you." 

" Faix an' it is," was the answer, " or we wouldn't be 
havin' the doin' of it." 

Pleased with this, he asked the man what part of Ire- 
land he came from. 

" Ah ! " said Brady on hearing the name, " I came from 
that region myself." 

" Yis," said the man, with another blow of his pick, 
4 ' there was many nice people in that place ; but I never 
heard that any of them left it." 

Braxfield, Lord. — Cockburn, who cordially detested 
Lord Braxfield, the Scotch jurist — painting him a "bloody 
Jeffreys " — styled him the best lawyer of his time. His 
wit and satire shot quick as a flash. 

A story of Braxfield 's early career at the bar tells how 
he queried some Lord Ordinary's authority for a ridiculous 
proposition, and was answered: 

" Lord Stair." 

" ISTa, my lord, that can never be, for there's na nonsense 
to be found in Stair." 



BENCH AND BAR. 49 

A foolish member of the Fifteen had delivered a ram- 
oling and irrelevant judgment, concluding with "such is 
my opinion." "Your opeenion," growled Braxfield, in 
one of his formidable asides. 

It chanced that two well-known advocates, one of them 
Charles Hay, afterwards Lord Newton, a member of the 
Crochallan Fencibles, and so a boon companion of Burns, 
had been "late, late at e'en drinkin' the wine." Next 
day, with every mark of their last night's debauch, they 
were pleading before Braxfield. He listened in contempt- 
uous amusement, but at length burst forth: 

" Ye may just pack up your papers and gang hame ; the 
tane of ye's riftin' punch and the ither belchin' claret " — 
how exquisitely subtle the distinction: — "and there'll be 
nae guid got out o' ye the day ! " 

Braxfield's favorite maxim: "Hang a thief when he's- 
young, and he'll no steal when he's auld." 

Much of Braxfield's table-talk owes its piquancy to the 
high place of the talker. Sir James Colquhoun, being 
asked to take a hand at cards as his partner, refused un- 
less my lord promised " no to misca' him." " I'll no misca' 
ye, Jamie," said Braxfield. The game went on ; Sir James 
played badly, and was vigorously cursed as " fule " and 
"idiot." He taxed his lordship with broken faith. But 
Braxfield returned that he was not miscalled but truly 
described. 

Brevity. — Brevity, the soul of wit, is finely illustrated 
in Judge Story's Advice to a Young Lawyer: 

"Be brief, be pointed; let your matter stand 
Lucid in order, solid and at hand; 
Spond not your words on trifles but condense; 
Strike with the mass of thought, not drops of sense; 
4 



50 WIT AND HUMOR 

Press to the close with vigor, once begun, 
And leave — how hard the task! — leave off when done. 
• Who draws a labored length of reasoning out, 
Puts straws in line for winds to whirl about; 
Who draws a tedious tale of learning o'er, 
Counts but the sands on Ocean's boundless shore. 
Victory in law is gained as battles fought, 
Not by the numbers, but the forces brought." 

The same thought by Judge Story is strikingly pre- 
sented in the following lines: 

"Stuff not your speech with every sort of law; 
Give us the grain and throw away the straw." 

"Who's a great lawyer? He who aims to say 
The least his cause requires, — not all he may." 

In an English case the judge charged: " Gentlemen of 
the jury, this is an action for debt, to which the defend- 
ant has pleaded as a set-off two things — a promissory 
note which has a long time to run, and an old gig which 
has but a short time to run. The case seems clear. You 
may find for the plaintiff." 

" The question, which has been so ably and exhaustively 
■argued by the counsel on each side, is one which cannot 
properly arise in this case." 125 Mass. 343. 

Lawyers are not noted for brevity of speech, yet an 
«eminent English jurist, probably on the theory that op- 
posites are apposites, is said to have been won by a laconic 
damsel while on his way to hold court in a country town. 
The girl was returning from market when the judge met 
her. 

" How deep is the creek, and what did you get for your 
butter ? " he asked. 

"Up to the knee; ninepence," was the answer, as the 
girl walked on. 

The judge turned his horse, rode back, and soon over- 
took her. 



BENCH AND BAR. 51 

" I liked your answer just now," he said, " and I like 
you. I think you would make a good wife. Will you 
marry me ? " 

She looked him over and said, " Yes." 

" Then get up behind me, and we will ride to town and 
be married." 

Referring to brevity, Chief Justice Bleckley, in his ad- 
dress to the Georgia Bar Association, in 1889, says: 

" Life is too short within which to do too much useless 
labor. There is certainly too much of it done. Waste 
work comprehends at least one-half of all work. My 
opinion is that two-thirds of the labor of lawyers and 
courts may be said to be wasted absolutely. Let us re- 
duce the useless work of the profession and of the bench 
to a minimum. . . . It is a mistake to throw legal 
work into the hopper pell-mell. It is a mistake to do 
it, no matter what court you present yourselves in. A 
great part of your labor should be in keeping out work 
when your causes come to be tried, whether in a lower 
or higher court. A great part of the most useful work 
you can do is to sift out alL the irrelevant and all the 
' unnecessary material that will collect about a law-suit. 
When you go into court your standards are all abstract. 
Law is abstraction; it is generality; it is a system of 
general rules for cases of each class. Your standards in 
any court, whether you are before the court alone or be- 
fore a court and jury, are all abstract. Bring in enough 
of the concrete case (all of it that touches the merits) to 
show how to apply the abstract rules of law to it. Then 
you have done your best. Let the concrete be so reduced 
in mass that you can readily apply the abstract to it. 
. . . One of the best methods of relieving ... all 
courts would be for lawyers to do most of their work be- 
fore they go to court ; to eliminate from their records and 



52 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the material of their cases all the irrelevant — all that 
can be spared without hazarding or impairing the merits." 

A surgeon testifying said: "On examining the prose- 
cutor, I found him suffering from a severe contusion of 
the integuments under the left orbit, with a great extrav- 
asation of blood, and ecchymosis in the surrounding cel- 
lular tissue, which was in a tumified state ; and there was 
also considerable abrasion of the cuticle." 

" You mean, I suppose," said the court, " that the man 
had a black eye ? " 

" Yes." 

" Then why not say so at once ? " 

Justice Bramwell, when attempting to be clear, was at 
times perplexing: 

" My good woman," said the learned judge, " you must 
give an answer in the fewest possible words of which you 
are capable, to the plain and simple question whether, 
when you were crossmg the street with the baby on your 
arm, and the omnibus was coming down on the right 
side and the cab on the left and the brougham was try- 
ing to pass the omnibus, you saw the plaintiff between the 
brougham and the cab, or whether, and when you saw 
him at all, and whether or not near the brougham, cab 
and omnibus, or either, or any two, and which of them 
respectively, or how it was ? " 

Judge Cooley once said to his law class: Young gentle- 
men, beware of the fatal facility of speech. 

Justice Norris is said to have delivered in the High 
Court of Calcutta the shortest charge ever delivered to a 
jury: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, the prisoners have nothing to 
say, and 1 have nothing to say; what have you to say ?" 

" Guilty," was what the prisoners heard the jury say. 



BENCH AND BAR. 53 

Justice Honyman, during an assize at Worcester, was 
equally sparing in speech: "Gentlemen of the jury, you 
have heard the evidence, and you have heard the learned 
counsel. It is for you to decide. If you believe the evi- 
dence of the defendant, the plaintiff is up a tree." 

In two minutes the jury rushed the plaintiff " up a tree." 

On cross-examination, an attorney insisted that the wit- 
ness should answer by a simple "Yes " or " No," asserting 
that every question could be replied to in that manner. 
The witness replied : 

" Will you allow me to ask you a question on those 
terms ? " 

" Certainly," said the counsel. 

" Then, may I ask, have you given up beating your 
wife?" 

This was a poser, for if answered by " Yes " it would 
imply that he had previously beaten her, and if by " No," 
that he continued to do so. 

Sir Samuel Martin bore in mind the golden rule not to 
perplex the jury with too many details, but to put his 
best point to them, and to put it strongly. As a judge 
he likewise sought to reduce matters to a small compass. 
After a mass of contradictory evidence and long speeches 
in a case, he summed up as follows: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the evidence 
and the speeches of the learned counsel. If you believe 
the old woman in red, you will find the prisoner guilty ; 
if you do not believe her, you will find the prisoner not 
guilty." 

" The full argument of counsel, occupying seventeen en- 
tire days, and an examination of the records, have satisfied 
me ..." 3 Woods' C. C. 78. 



54 WIT AND HUMOR. 

A student of a prominent English college was placed 
in the dock, charged with a petty theft committed in a 
shop, and the defense was his station in life, his prepos- 
sessing appearance, and his family. The judge's charge 
was brief: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, this is a short issue ; the pris- 
oner at the dock is a young man of attractive manners 
and irreproachable connection, who stole a pair of silk 
stockings, and you will find accordingly." 

Brewster, Benjamin H.— Attorney-General Brews- 
ter, whose face was terribly disfigured by scars, was once 
engaged in a case as attorney for the Pennsylvania Kail- 
road, and the opposing counsel, in his closing speech, 
made a most brutal attack on him. 

" The dealings of the railroad," he said, " are as tortu- 
ous and twisted as the features of the man who repre- 
sented it." 

Brewster gave no outward sign that he felt this cruel 
blow until he had finished his argument. Then he said : 

" For the first time in my life the personal defect from 
which I suffer has been the subject of public remark. I 
will tell you how I came by it. When I was five years 
of age, I was one day playing with a younger sister when 
she fell into an open grate where a fire was burning. I 
sprang to her assistance, dragged her from danger, and 
in doing so I fell myself with my face upon the burning 
coals. When I was picked up my face was as black " — 
and his finger transfixed his antagonist — " as that man's 
heart." 

Bribery. — Jim Webster was being tried for attempt- 
ing to bribe a colored witness, Sam Johnsing, to testify 
falsely. 

" You say this defendant offered you a bribe of fifty 



BENCH AND BAR. 55 

dollars to testify in his behalf," said Lawyer Gouge to 
Johnsing. 

" Yes, sah." 

" Now repeat precisely what he said, using his own 
words." 

" He said he would git me fifty dollars if I — " 

" He didn't speak as a third person." 

" No, sah ; he tuck good keer dat dar was no third pus- 
son present. Dar was only two, — us two. De defend- 
ant am too smart ter hab anybody list'nin' when he am 
talking about his own reskelity." 

" I know that well enough, but he spoke to you in the 
first person, didn't he ? " 

" I was the fust person myself." 

" You don't understand me. When he was talking to 
you, did he use the words, " I will pay fifty dollars ? " 

" No, boss ; he didn't say nuffin about your payin' me 
fifty dollars. Your name wasn't mentioned, 'ceptin' dat 
he tole me ef eber I got inter a scrape dat you was de 
best lawyer in San Antone to fool de judge and jury ; 
in fac', you was de best lawyer in de town fer coverin' 
up any kind of reskelity." 

" You can step down." 

Brice, Calvin S. — There is no more striking example 
of success attained by the efforts of individual ability 
than that in the career of the late ex-Senator Brice, of 
Ohio. It is no time at all since he hadn't enough to flag 
a bread wagon. 

It was in Gov. Foster's time as chief magistrate of 
Ohio that Brice, then a poor, hard-up lawyer, managed 
to get into Foster's debt about $2,000. One day Brice 
came to Foster and told him that the law business didn't 
pay, and asked him to appoint him to a position where 
he might make a living. 



56 WIT AND HUMOR 

" Can't," said Foster, "you're a Democrat." 

" I admit," replied Brice, " that I am slightly a Demo- 
crat, but if you'd give me a position, I'll guarantee that 
nobody will notice it." 

" Can't do it," said Foster. " To appoint a Democrat 
would ruin me." 

" But you'll never get your $2,000," said Brice. "You 
might as well ask me to make a star as to make that 
$2,000 with my law practice." 

" I'll tell you what I'll do," said Foster. " I am all 
tangled up with Hocking Valley on the New York Stock 
Exchange, and I want somebody to go there and look 
after things. I'll send you if you'll go." 

Brice jumped at the chance. Foster gave him $500 
and a lot of directions, and impressed upon him solemnly 
the necessity of doing just what he was told. If Brice 
had been a waiter he would have taken your order, and 
then brought you anything he pleased. He would have 
used his own judgment. That's what he did with Foster's 
Hocking Valley deal, but he clawed off a $40,000 profit, 
whereas if he had done as Foster told him he would have 
lost all. Foster was delighted, and like a good old man 
in the story book, he gave the young man $20,000. Then 
Brice went back to Wall Street and plunged. 

Brice was endowed with a genius for wealth-getting. 
His greatest play was building the Nickel Plate. He put 
in every dollar he could get and from any source. There 
came a time, too, when to save himself from utter ruin, 
if not from something worse, he had to sell. He went to 
Vanderbilt, whose road the Nickel Plate paralleled. Van- 
derbilt gave him what low natures call " the laugh." He 
wouldn't buy the Nickel Plate. He said he could afford 
to wait for the first-mortgage foreclosure and buy it from 
the sheriff. 

" If you don't buy it, Jay Gould will," said Brice. 



BENCH AND BAR. 57 

" Oh, no, he won't," said Yanderbilt, and then he gave 
the anxious Brice a second edition of " the laugh." 

Brice then went to Gould. He knew that Gould didn't 
want the Nickel Plate, but he had a beautiful scheme to 
propose. He wanted to let Yanderbilt in for the road, 
and he knew he would buy it before he would allow 
Gould to get it. Here came Brice's strategy. He told 
Gould that if he would sit silent and not contradict, 
neither affirm nor deny, any newspaper article to the 
effect that he was going to buy the Nickel Plate, and, 
after this clamlike silence had continued for a week, if he 
would then slowly ride over the Nickel Plate in an ob- 
servation car, Yanderbilt would buy the road and he 
would give Gould $500,000. 

Gould didn't care for the $500,000, but he was a jocose 
speculator, and it struck him that the whole thing was a 
majestic joke on Yanderbilt. And that was the story of 
it. The papers came out and said Gould was going to 
buy the Nickel Plate. Gould, when asked, kept mum 
and looked wise. At the end of a week he meandered 
snail-like over the Nickel Plate, smoking cigars from the 
rear end of an observation car, and had all the air of a 
man who was looking at a piece of property. Stories 
were wired about Gould's trip from every water tank and 
way station along the line, and before Gould had reached 
Chicago, Yanderbilt, in a fit of hysterics, wired Brice 
that he would take the Nickel Plate. Yanderbilt took 
the Nickel Plate and Brice was saved. 

Brougham, Lord.— Brougham was one of the most 
learned men of his time. Samuel Rogers, on seeing him 
drive away from a country house, remarked, " There go 
Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac 
Newton, Lord Chesterfield, and a great many others, in 
•one post-chaise." 



58 WIT AND HUMOR. 

The saying of Augustus, " I found Rome brick, I leave 
it marble," is finely used in the peroration of Brougham's 
speech on Law Reform, in the House of Commons in 
1828: 

" It was the boast of Augustus, — it formed part of the 
glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost, — 
that he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a 
praise not unworthy a great prince, and to which the pres- 
ent reign also has its claims. But how much nobler will 
be the sovereign's boast when he shall have ic to say that 
he found law dear, and left it cheap ; found it a sealed 
book, left it a living letter ; found it the patrimony of the 
rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two- 
edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of 
honesty and the shield of innocence ! " 

On Brougham's elevation to the woolsack, Daniel O'Con- 
nell said : " If Brougham knew a little law, he would know 
a little of everything." 

Sydney Smith, seeing Brougham in a carriage, on the 
panel of which was the letter B, observed : 

" There goes a carriage with a B outside and a wasp 
inside." 

Brougham declined Canning's offer of the office of chief 
baron of the exchequer, because it would keep him out of 
Parliament. 

" True," said Canning, " but you will be only one stage 
from the woolsack." 

" Yes," rejoined Brougham, " but the horses will be off." 

Brougham's self-importance is seen in his remark con- 
cerning the cabinet in which he was lord chancellor from 
1830-34: 

" The "Whigs are all ciphers ; I am the only unit in the 
cabinet that gives & value to them." 



BENCH AND BAR. 59 

In a speech on the address to the crown, after the Duke 
df Wellington had become prime minister, Brougham 
said: 

" The country sometimes heard with dismay that the 
soldier was abroad. Is"o w there is another person abroad, — 
a less important person ; in the eyes of some, an insig- 
nificant person — whose labors had tended to produce this 
state of things. The schoolmaster is abroad! and I trust 
more to the schoolmaster armed with his primer, than to 
the soldier in full military array, for upholding and ex- 
tending the liberties of my country." 

Brougham's irritable temper often led him, when lord 
chancellor, to squabbles with the counsel at the bar. On 
one occasion, while the learned Sir Edward Sugden was 
pleading before his lordship in a very important case, 
and just in the middle of what he conceived to be the 
most essential part of his argument, Brougham suddenly 
threw back his head on his chair, and, closing both eyes, 
remained in that position for some time, as if he had been 
asleep. Sugden abruptly paused, waiting no doubt till 
his lordship should resume an attitude which would be 
more encouraging for him to proceed with his argument. 
On this, Brougham suddenly started up from his reclin- 
ing position, and resuming that in which he usually sat 
when on the bench, apostrophized Sir Edward after the 
manner so peculiar to himself: 

" Go on, Sir Edward ; proceed, Sir Edward ; what's the 
cause of the stoppage ? " 

" My lord, I thought your lordship was not attending 
to my argument." 

" You have no right to think any such thing, Sir Ed- 
ward ; it's highly improper in you to do so ; go on, if you 
please." 

Sugden resumed his argument, and had proceeded but 



60 WIT AND HUMOR. 

two or three minutes, when Brougham snatched up a pen. 
and commenced writing on some letter sheets in front of 
him. Sugden again paused in his address to the court, 
and leaned with his elbows on the bench before him, as 
if willing to wait patiently until his lordship should finish 
his writing. 

" Sir Edward ! " exclaimed Brougham in angry and 
ironical accents ; " pray what's the matter now ? " 

" I thought, my lord, that your lordship was tempo- 
rarily occupied with some matter of your own." 

" Eeally, Sir Edward, this is beyond endurance." 

"I beg your lordship's pardon; but I thought your 
lordship was writing some private letter." 

" Nothing of the kiud, Sir Edward," said his lordship, 
tartly; " nothiug of the kind. I w r as taking a note of 
some points in your argument. See, would you like to 
look at it ? " said he, sarcastically, holding out the sheet 
of paper towards Sir Edward. 

" O not at all, your lordship. I do not doubt your 
lordship's word. I must have been under some mis- 
take." 

Sir Edward again resumed, and Lord Brougham, throw- 
ing his head back on his chair, looked up towards the 
ceiling of the court. 

Brougham had a great horror of hearing the intermin- 
able arguments which some of the junior counsel were in 
the habit of making, after he conceived everything had 
been said which could be said on the real merits of the 
case before the court by the gentlemen who preceded 
them. His hints to them to be brief on such occasions 
were sometimes extremely happy. On one occasion, after 
listening with the greatest attention to the arguments of 
two counsel on one side, from ten o'clock till half -past 
two, a third rose to address the court on the same side. 



BENCH AND BAR. 61 

His lordship was quite unprepared for this additional in- 
fliction, and exclaimed: 

" What ! Mr. A , are you really going to speak on 

the same side ? " 

" Yes, my lord, I mean to trespass on your lordship's 
attention for a short time." 

" Then," said his lordship, looking the orator signifi- 
cantly in the face, " then, Mr. A , you had better cut 

your speech as short as possible, otherwise you must not 
be surprised if you see me dozing ; for really, this is more 
than human nature can endure." 

The youthful barrister took the hint, kept closely to 
the point at issue — a thing very rarely done by barris- 
ters — and condensed his argument into a reasonable 
compass. 

Brown, James T. — Brown, of Greensburg, Indiana, 
once defended a case in the Circuit Court of that state. 
The judge was not very learned in technicalities, knew 
little Latin and less Greek. The jury were ordinary farm- 
ers. After plaintiff's counsel had opened the case, Brown 
rose and spoke for two hours in a flowery, eloquent man- 
ner, repeating Latin and Greek, and using all the techni- 
calities he could think of. The jury eyed him with their 
mouths wide open, the judge looked on with amazement, 
and the lawyers laughed aloud. The case was submitted 
to the jury without one word of reply, and their verdict, 
without leaving the box, was against Brown. 

In the morning Brown appeared in court, and, bowing 
politely to the judge, said: 

" May it please your honor, I humbly rise this morning 
to move for a new trial; not on my own account, for I 
richly deserve the verdict, but on behalf of my client, 
who is an innocent party. Yesterday I gave wing to my 
imagination and rose above the stars in a blaze of glory. 



62 WIT AND HUMOR. 

I saw at the time that it was all Greek and turkey tracks 
to you and the jury. This morning I feel humble, and I 
promise the court, if it will grant a new trial, that I will 
try to bring myself down to the comprehension of the 
court and jury." 

The judge: "Motion overruled, and a fine of five dol- 
lars imposed upon Mr. Brown for contempt of court." 

"For what?" 

" For insinuating that the court doesn't know Latin and 
Greek from turkey tracks." 

" I shall not appeal from that decision ; your honor has 
comprehended me this time." 

On another occasion, before a circuit judge of the same 
state, Brown appeared for the defendant, demurred to the 
sufficiency of the declaration, and made a short but very 
pointed argument. The judge, a stupid specimen of his 
class, waking up in the midst of the argument, interrupted 
him, and asked what the pint was that he was driving at. 
Brown hesitated a moment, and then deliberately replied : 

" If the court please, I am about to illustrate it by dia- 
grams, and I hope to make it so plain that the audience 
and perhaps even the court will understand it." 

At another session of the court, Brown was arguing the 
case with masterly ability, when the judge remarked that 
he need not argue the law, as the court understood that 
perfectly. Brown replied, with much meekness, that he 
" merely desired to talk about the law as it is in the boohs, 
which would be entirely different law from any his honor 
was acquainted with." 

Browne, Irving. — The late Irving Browne, so well 
remembered in Troy as lawyer and wit, was not found 
lacking when he essayed the building of lofty rhyme. In 
1888 he contributed to the Fair Journal, a little paper 



BENCH AND BAR 63 

published nightly for two weeks as the official organ of 
the Beth Emeth fair, in Albany, these unassuming but 
charming lines, which are not generally known to his 

admirers: 

The Bubbles of Life. 

A boy and girl upon the yellow beach 

Blew shining bubbles in the summer air, 
And as they floated off they named them, each 

Choosing what seemed to him or her most fair. 

" I name mine ' Wealth,' " exclaimed the careless boy; 

"So may I never have to count the cost, 
But ships and houses own, as now a toy." 

But Wealth was driven far out to sea and lost. 

"I name mine 'Beauty,'" exclaimed the careless girl; 

" So women all shall envy my fair face, 
And men shall kneel and beg me for a curl." 

But Beauty vanished quickly into space. 

"I name this 'Fame,'" essayed the boy again; 

" So may I hear my praises every hour 
As orator or soldier sung by men." 

But Fame was wrecked against the beacon lower. 

" This is ' Long Life,' " returned the little maid; 

" So may I happy be for many a year, 
Nor be till late of ugly death afraid." 

But Long Life broke within a graveyard near. 

At last twin globules they together blew, 
And named them "Love; " as slow they rose on high 

The sun shone through them with prismatic hue, 
Till Love was lost within the glowing sky. 

Buller, Francis. — Justice Buller, of the King's Bench, 
said that his idea of heaven was "to sit at nisi prim all 
day, and play whist all night." 

Burke, James Francis.— Burke, of the Pittsburgh 
bar, is widely known as an effective stump speaker. His 
forceful style is heightened with a fine humor and a 



64 WIT AND HUMOR. 

lively wit. Some of his campaign experiences and ob- 
servations are worthy of preservation. 

In the campaign of 1892 I was billed to speak with an 
Eastern congressman in a country church near Albany, 
New York. There was a fair audience present. The 
local burgess presided. There were just two lamps in the 
church, suspended from the ceiling. The burgess pro- 
ceeded to light one lamp, and then told me to speak as 
long as the oil lasted. I noticed there was more oil in 
the other lamp, but concluded that as my colleague was 
a congressman he was entitled to the best of it. My 
lamp lasted an hour, and thereupon the old burgess pro- 
ceeded to light the other, and accidentally let it fall, and 
the audience disbanded in the dark, but the burgess as- 
sured the congressman if he would come back next year 
he would get the first lamp. The chairman afterwards 
told me that the lamp business was an old device with 
them to keep speakers from talking too long. They first 
tried it on their preacher. 

Another incident happened when I was billed to speak 
at Bucksport, Me. This time I suffered. The train was 
behind time, and after the local candidate for governor 
had spoken, the next speaker was told to keep on talking 
until I arrived. The hand-bills had announced me as 
" The Honorable," etc., which not only surprised me, but 
afterwards deceived the committee in charge itself. When 
I stepped upon the depot platform I didn't know the com- 
mittee, and they never suspected me of being " The Hon- 
orable," and I sauntered off to the hall. I took a back 
seat until the speaker closed, and as the time roiled on 1 
thought he was pretty long-winded. Finally, about 11 
o'clock, he gave out, saying, " Well, fellow-citizens, I can't 
kill time any longer, and you can bet your last dollar I'll 



BENCH AND BAR. 65 

never be fooled by one of those fellows out west again." 
Before I knew it the meeting was over, and we all dis- 
covered our mistake. 

I remember one night when Governor Hastings was 
making a speech in a small town in Illinois, before he was 
elected governor and when he was comparatively un- 
known in the west. The old chairman said to him as he 
came upon the stage, "Just write yer name an' where ye 
live on a kerd, so I won't make no mistake." Hastings 
wrote hastily, "Mr. Hastings, from Penn." The old man 
couldn't see any too well, and Hastings' writing wasn't 
any too good, so you may imagine Hastings' surprise when 
he was introduced in this manner: "The next speaker is 
from a Democratic state. I don't know why they sent 
him to talk Republicanism in Illinois, but I'll introduce 
him anyway. Mr. Haskins, from Tennessee." 

The size of the audience is dependent upon newspaper- 
advertising in advance and the personal popularity of the 
speakers. Eliminate the newspaper advertising and you 
will have vacant seats. After the meeting, however, ac- 
counts published in the average newspaper outside of the 
large cities are an interesting study the next morning. 
Here is an instance: "During the last campaign in a 
large town not far from Pittsburgh, a Republican speaker 
found himself touched up as follows, the next morning: 

"At the Opera House last night , of , made 

one of the most eloquent speeches heard here for years. 
He tore the Democratic arguments to shreds and carried 
his audience off its feet by his thrilling eloquence and 
finished address. The house was packed to the doors." 

The Democratic paper said: 

"Seventeen white men, three colored men, nineteen 
boys and an old woman composed the entire attendance 
5 



66 WIT AND HUMOR. 

at the Eepublican meeting in the Opera House last night. 
It was a frost. The water froze in the pitcher on the 
speaker's table. The quartet sang as if it was working 
for small wages and had little hope of getting its money. 
The speech of was one of the most gigantic com- 
positions of wind and falsehood ever heard in this town. 
He was introduced as 'Major' , but it is said he ac- 
quired the military title by leading a drum corps when 
he was a boy." 

Of course the campaigner reads these notices and smiles. 
He looks upon them as one of the penalties of politics and 
there it ends. 

Burleigh, Clarence.— The jeweled wit and charm- 
ing humor of Burleigh, of the Pittsburgh bar, are widely 
! lown. To a client making the inquiry, his definition of 

contingent fee, " If you lose, I get nothing ; if you win. 

m get nothing," is a gem. 

j^ot less brilliant was his reply to the question, What 
is the Rule in Shelley's Case: " The lawyers get the oyster 
and the clients get the shells." 

As attorney for the city of Pittsburgh, Burleigh's opin- 
ions were the court of last resort in legal matters affect- 
ing the municipality and its administrative departments; 
and he expressed them in a clear and vigorous style. 
Conflicting views having arisen between him and a prom- 
inent city official, he quickly closed the discussion with 
the latter by saying: " You may be right, and I may be 
wrong ; but my opinion is worth more than yours, be- 
cause my opinion decides the question, and yours does 
not." 

& prima facie case: "A case good in front and bad in 
the rear." 



BENCH 'AND BAR. 67 

Burr, Aaron. — Burr was admitted to the New York 

bar in 1782. His election to the United States Senate 
and to the Yice Presidency, and his subsequent trial f 3r 
treason, are matters of history. 

He asserted that the maxim, " Never put off until to- 
morrow what can be done to-day," was made for slug 
gards. A better reading of it is, " ' Never do to-day what 
you can do as well to-morrow ; ' because something may 
occur to make you regret your premature action." 

He defined law : " Law is whatever is boldly asserted 
and plausibly maintained." 

In a letter to Pichon, secretary of the French Legation 
at Washington, Burr said : 

" The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, 
and pleasure my business." 

Bushe, Charles Kendal. — Bushe was one of the most 
eloquent men of his time. The might of his reasoning, 
the music of his diction, and the absolute enchantment of 
an exquisite delivery won him signal success at the Irish 
bar. His wit came without effort. 

At a private theatrical entertainment, when pressed for 
an opinion, Bushe said that he preferred the prompter; 
for he heard the most and saw the least of him. 

At a dinner given by a Dublin Orangeman, when poli- 
tics ran high, and Bushe was suspected of holding pro- 
Catholic opinions, the host indulged so freely that he fell 
under the table. The Duke of Kichmond, who was then 
viceroy, picked him up and replaced him in the chair. 

" My Lord Duke," said Bushe, " though you say I am 
attached to the Catholics, at all events I never assisted 
at the elevation of the Host." 



68 WIT AND' HUMOR 

Sir Bobert Peel, who was present, related this Ion-mot: 

One of Bushe's relations, who rarely indulged in any 
ablutions, complained of a sore throat. 

" Fill a pail with hot water until it reaches your knees; 
then take a pint of oatmeal and scrub your legs with it 
for a quarter of an hour," was what Bushe recommended 
as a remedy. 

« Why, hang it, man," said the other, " that's washing 
one's feet." 

" I admit, my dear fellow," replied Bushe, gravely, " it 
is liable to that objection." 

Someone having remarked that the judges of the Court 
of Common Pleas had little or nothing to do, Bushe 
quietly remarked, " Well, well, they're quite equal to it" 

Once, when two bishops declared that, in choosing the 
officers of the Ecclesiastical Board, they must vote for the 
nominees of the minister, to whom they owed their mitres, 
Bushe sent the following slip to Plunket: 

"It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves: we 
are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." 

Chief Baron O'Grady was trying a case in an assize 
town where the court-house abutted on to the fair green 
and a fair was in progress. Outside the court were teth- 
ered a number of asses. As counsel was addressing the 
court, one of these began to bray. Instantly the Chief 
Baron stopped the speaker. " Wait a moment, Mr. Bushe ; 
I can't hear two at a time." The court roared, and the 
advocate grew red. But presently, when it came to the 
summing up, the judge was in full swing when another 
ass struck in, whether by the counsel's contrivance or not, 
who shall say? Anyhow, up jumped Bushe with his 
hand to his ear. "Would your lordship speak a little 
louder ? there's such an echo in the court." 



BENCH AND BAR. 69 

Bushe made this impromptu verse upon two agitators 
who had refused to fight duels, one on account of his affec- 
tion for his wife, and the other because of his love for 
his daughter: 

Two heroes of Erin, abhorrent of slaughter, 

Improved on the Hebrew command; 
One honored his wife, and the other his daughter, 

That his days might be long in the land. 

Butler, Benjamin P. — In one of his first law cases 
Butler said, when the case was called: 

" Let notice be given." 

" In what paper," asked the venerable clerk. 

"In the Lowell Advertiser" said Butler, selecting a 
local paper detested by the political party to which the 
clerk and the judges belonged. 

" The Lowell Advertiser! " said the clerk, restraining 
his feelings. " I don't know such a paper." 

" Pray, Mr. Clerk," said Butler, " don't begin telling 
the court what you don't know, or there will be no time 
for anything else." 

One of the very last cases in which that distinguished 
advocate, Rufus Choate, appeared, was an action for dam- 
ages for personal injuries to his client. Associated with 
him were two other leaders of the bar. The three to- 
gether made up a trio of legal ability of the very highest 
order. For the defence stood Butler, single-handed, and 
apparently inattentive to the progress of the trial. He 
took no notes, but a little occurrence soon brought him 
to his feet, and proved that he was awake and at his post. 
A question had been asked a witness, the answer to which 
seemed to damage the plaintiff's prospects. One of the 
trio, in apparently a by-play to his associates, gave a slight 



70 WIT AND HUMOR. 

groan of incredulity, doubtless intended for effect on the 
jury. In an instant up sprang the vigilant Ben. 

" Stop ! stop ! stop ! " cried he, in his impetuous way to 
the witness. 

" What is the matter, Mr. Butler ? " asked the judge, 
taken by surprise at the interruption. 

"May it please your honor," replied the imperturbable 

advocate, in the blandest of accents, " my brother L 

is taken suddenly ill. Did you not hear him groan just 
now? The court might like to take a short recess, I 
thought." 

" Proceed with the examination of the witness. Let 
there be no more interruption," said the judge. But the 
object of the interruption was accomplished: the effect, 
or intended effect, of the enemy's gun was neutralized. 

Butler being for the defence, of course had to address 
the jury first, in the closing arguments. His analysis of 
the special characteristics of his three opponents was 
acute and discriminating. To each of them he ascribed 
the highest of tact and talent in his own department. 
But to his brother Choate he gave more than common 
encomium : " He is retained in every great case, to lend 
to it the power of his rare abilities to obtain a verdict. 
Such, gentlemen of the jury, is the charm of his elo- 
quence that he has only to wave over you his magic 
wand, and you are so completely mesmerized by his will 
that you will say black is white, and white black, if he 
only says it is so. You are wholly under the bewitching 
influence of his eloquence, and are led by it whitherso- 
ever he chooses to lead you. You start, gentlemen ; you 
brace yourself back with a determined air, as if to say, 
however it may be with others, you are proof against his 
blandishments. Ah, gentlemen, little do you know the 



BENCH AND BAR. 71 

power of the spell that will soon be upon you! I have 
myself seen it in so many instances that I speak with 
confidence and certainty on this point." And so he went 
on to depict the Choatea?i style of eloquence, with a slight 
allusion to the famous somnambulist line of defence in 
the Tyrrell case, till he had succeeded in fortifying the 
jury against the last words — always the most potent — 
of the closing argument. 

Choate arose, evidently not in good health, pale and 
emaciated, the deep lines of his classic face tremulous with 
emotion, and in his very exordium complained bitterly 
and earnestly of the injustice done him by the caricature 
drawn so wantonly and maliciously by the counsel for the 
defence, asserting over and over again that he was a far 
different man, and his eloquence — such as he had — far 
different from that attempted to be fastened on him ; that, 
in short, he was a plain-spoken man, accustomed to use 
only such common sense as his Maker had given him, and 
such a presentation of the facts in any case as the testi- 
mony warranted. He then proceeded to verify his asser- 
tion by a corresponding style of eloquence and argument, 
entirely unusual with him, and only feebly, for him, put 
the case to the jury. The damaging effect of Butler's 
novel tactics was evident from beginning to end ; and the 
jury did not agree upon a verdict, which was equivalent 
to one for Butler's clients. 

Butler and Judge Hoar met as opposing counsel in an 
action for damages for loss of life, brought before the 
Massachusetts Supreme Court. Butler cited from Job, 
" Yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life." Hoar 
remarked that that was a plea of the devil in a motion for 
a new trial, and he didn't think the court would be more 
impressed by it because of its modern endorsement. 



72 WIT AND HUMOR 

" How high was the dam ? " asked Butler of a stubborn 
witness. 

"About twenty feet." 

" What was there on top of the dam? " 

"A log." 

u What did the log rest on at the east end? " 

u On a rock." 

" What did the west end rest on ? " 

" Don't know." 

The General dropped his pen suddenly and sharply cried 
out: 

" You don't know ? Why don't you know ? " 

The witness changed the cross of his legs and shifted 
his quid to the other cheek and then replied : 

" Because I don't." 

The General got up enthusiastically, and pointing his 
index finger at the witness shrieked out: 

" Do you mean to say to this court and jury that you 
can't tell what the west end oi the log rested on ? " 

" Certainly I do." 

" When did you see the log last ? " 

" Day before yesterday." 

" And didn't you see the west end of the log ? " 

"Ho." 

" Now, on your oath, why can't you tell what the west 
end of that log rested on ? " 

" Because the west end was stuck in the bank." 

The tipstaff rapped and cried out " Silence " to the 
laughing crowd. 

The reason that Butler was not made an LL. D. by 
Harvard University when he was Governor of Massachu- 
setts dates back almost to the time that Prof. Webster, 
of that institution, was executed for murder. The Gen- 



BENCH AND BAR. 73 

-eral, in cross-examining a Harvard professor, asked him 
what his trade was. 

" I'm a professor in Harvard College." 

"A what?" 

" A Harvard professor." 

" Oh, yes. We hung one of them the other day." 

"While Butler was delivering a speech in Boston during 
an exciting political campaign, one of his hearers cried 
•out: "How about the spoons, Ben?" Benjamin's good 
oye twinkled merrily as he said : " Now, don't mention 
that, please. / was a Republican when 1 stole those 
spoons." 

Cady, Daniel.— Many a city lawyer has gone into 
the country districts to try a case where he would have 
a country lawyer pitted against him, and has learned 
sometimes to his disgust, as well as to his surprise, that 
the country lawyer was a great deal more than a match 
for him upon every point. Daniel Cady, great in his 
day and generation, was a country lawyer in a little town 
in New York. A leading lawyer of New York City 
went to try a case in which Cady was counsel on the 
other side, and on his way stopped at Albany to borrow ■ 
a few law books from Nicholas Hill, to whom he said 
that he was going up into the country to literally " chew 
up a fellow named Cady." The New York City lawyer 
had apparently never heard of Cady before, and Hill 
quietly remarked : 

" I know something of that man Cady. When you get 
through with him stop in my office and tell me what kind 
of a man he is." 

The city lawyer returned one week later and informed 
Hill that he had just been defeated in an important case 



74 WIT AND HUMOR. 

by that man Cady, who was the greatest lawyer he had 
ever met. 

When Cady had a case to argue, his labor on the de- 
tails was enormous. He took it to his bed and board; 
had inspirations concerning it in his sleep; repeatedly 
arose at night to secure these by memoranda; and never 
ceased to mine and chamber in a great case, till it was 
actually called on the calendar. Then were to be seen 
the equipment and power of a great lawyer. 

Campbell, John A. — Judge Campbell was, perhaps, 
the ablest jurist the state of Alabama ever had. Before 
the war he had a large practice in Mobile and frequently 
appeared in the Supreme Court of Alabama. On one oc- 
casion the court interrupted him by frequent questions, 
much to his annoyance. After standing it some time, 
Campbell stopped, and then, slowly addressing the bench,, 
said : 

" If the court will listen, the court will learn." 
The court listened, and the interruptions ceased. 

Chase, Salmon P. — When Chief Justice Chase chose 
to unbend himself he could be witty as well as wise. At 
a social gathering, when he was Secretary of the Treas- 
ury, the subject of taxation having been mooted, a distin- 
guished naval officer present said he had paid all his taxes 
except the income tax. " I have a little property," said 
he, " which brings me in a yearly rental, but the tax- 
gatherers have not spotted it. I do not know whether I 
ought to let the thing go that way or not. What would 
you do if you were in my place, Mr. Chase ? " 

There was a merry twinkle in the eyes of the Secre- 
tary, as he answered archly : " I think it the duty of every 
man to live unspotted as long as he can." 



jSench and bar. 75. 

Charge of Court. — Whenever Lord Bo wen allowed 
rree play to his powers of irony, his charges to the jury 
were most entertaining. While on circuit, he tried a 
burglar who had entered a hous3 from the roof and left 
his boots on the tiles, and who alleged, by way of de- 
fence, that he was accustomed to take midnight strolls 
on the roofs of dwellings, and that he had simply been 
led by a feeling of curiosity to descend into one of the 
houses. 

" If, gentlemen of the jury," said Bowen, " you think it 
probable that the prisoner considered the roofs of houses 
a salubrious place for an evening walk — if you suppose 
that the temptation to inspect the interior of the houses 
beneath him was the outcome of a natural and pardon- 
able curiosity — in that case, of course you will acquit 
him, and regard him as a thoughtful and considerate man, 
who would naturally remove his boots before entering 
the house and take every precaution not to disturb his 
neighbors." 

In an action to recover damages for an assault and bat- 
tery tried before an eminent judge of a district in West- 
ern New York, the judge sympathized very strongly with 
the defendant, and charged : 

" Gentlemen of the jury, if the plaintiff had met me 
walking along the street with my wife on my arm, and 
had called me what it is not denied he called the defend- 
ant, I would have knocked him down, just as the defend- 
ant did. But, gentlemen of the jury, that is not the law. 
You may take the case, gentlemen." 

The jury gave the plaintiff six cents damages without 
leaving their seats. 

Judge Hammond, of the United States District Court, 
tells a good story on himself. When he first went on the 



76 WIT AND HUMOR. 

bench he was anxious that his charges to the jury should 
be clear and easily understood. One of the first cases 
tried was a very important one, and he was particularly 
careful in drawing up his instructions. He read them im- 
pressively to the jury, and they retired to their room. In 
about an hour they returned to the court room and re- 
quested his honor to read the charge again, which was 
clone, and they filed back to the jury room. After another 
long wait, a knock was heard at the door. On being 
opened by the bailiff, one of the jurymen asked to speak 
with the court. It was one of Judge Hammond's old 
clients, and he apologized for troubling him by saying 
that he knew him better than any of the other jurors, 
and was asked to put a question to him on behalf of the 

jury- 

" You see, Bill," said the juror, " you and me have known 
each other a good while, and }^ou know I wouldn't ask 
anything I thought wasn't right of you." 

After some assurance from the court that he could not 
offend, the juror said : 

" See here, Bill, the jury want to know whether you 
would have any objections if we would hire a lawyer to 
explain your charge to us." 

Justice Maule would occasionally talk to the jury in a 
style that they could not well misunderstand. He once 
said : 

" Gentlemen, the learned counsel is perfectly right in 
his law ; there is some evidence upon that point ; but he's 
a lawyer, and you're not, and you do not know what he 
means by some evidence; so I'll tell you. Suppose there 
was an action on a bill of exchange, and six persons swore 
they saw the defendant accept it; and six others swore 
they heard him say he should have to pay it; and six 
others knew him intimately and swore to his handwrii- 



BENCH AND BAR. 77 

ing; and suppose on the other side they called a poor old 
man, who had been at school with the defendant forty 
years before, and had not seen him since, and he said he 
rather thought the acceptance was not the defendant's 
writing, why there'd be some evidence that it was not; 
and that's what Mr. means in this case." 

Lord Denman once said : " I remember an action tried 
before Gibbs, C. J., brought against Alderman Wood by 
a man whom he had sentenced to be imprisoned; and it 
was contended that the imprisonment was illegal, be- 
cause the sentence did not also direct that he should be 
whipped. G-ibbs said to the jury: 'Give the plaintiff 
the full damages he has sustained by reason of not hav- 
ing been whipped.' " 

An odd story describes the arithmetical process by 
which Baron Perrot arrived at the value of conflicting 
evidence: " Gentlemen of the jury, there are fifteen wit- 
nesses who swear that the watercourse used to flow in a 
ditch on the northern side of the hedge. On the other 
hand, gentlemen, there are nine witnesses who swear that 
the watercourse used to flow on the south side of the 
hedge. Now, gentlemen, if you subtract nine from fif- 
teen, there remain six witnesses wholly uncontradicted ; 
and I recommend you to give your verdict for the party 
who called those six witnesses." 

Justice Maule was trying a hypocritical saint on a crim- 
inal charge. The defendant called a number of charac- 
ter witnesses, whose knowledge of his good reputation 
was very limited. On one point, however, they laid con- 
siderable stress. The prisoner was well known to them 
as a Bible reader and a Sunday School teacher. He was, 
in fact, in their opinion, the very incarnation of piety 
and virtue. 



78 WIT AND HUMOR. 

The evidence against the accused was overwhelming 
and Maule proceeded, in no uncertain language, to sum 
up for conviction. On the conclusion of the learned 
judge's remarks, the prisoner's counsel said: 

"I crave your lordship's pardon; you have not re- 
ferred to the prisoner's good character, as proved by a 
number of witnesses." 

"You are right, sir," said his lordship; and then, ad- 
dressing the jury, he continued : " Gentlemen, I am re- 
quested to draw your attention to the prisoner's charac- 
ter, which has been spoken to by gentlemen, I doubt not, 
of the greatest respectability and veracity. If you be- 
lieve them, and also the witnesses for the prosecution, it 
appears to me that they have established what to many 
persons may seem incredible, namely, that even a man 
•of piety and virtue, occupying the position of Bible 
reader and Sunday School teacher, may be guilty of com- 
mitting a heinous and grossly immoral crime." 

Daniel Webster, in his arguments before juries, some- 
times read the conclusion of a charge by Judge Dudley, 
a trader and a farmer, a manuscript copy of which he 
had for many years in his desk. It was a treat to hear 
him read it in pure and undefiled English, as it doubtless 
came from Judge Dudley's lips: 

" You have heard, gentlemen of the jury, what has 
been said in this case by the lawyers, the rascals! but no, 
I will not abuse them. It is their business to make a 
good cause for their clients; they are paid for it, and 
they have done in this case well enough ; but you and I, 
gentlemen, have something else to consider. They talk 
of law. Why, gentlemen, it is not law that we want, 
but justice. They would govern us by the common law 
of England. Trust me, gentlemen, common sense is a 
much safer guard for us ; the common sense of Raymond, 



BENCH AND BAR Y9 

Epping, Exeter, and the other towns which have sent us 
here to try this case between two of our neighbors. A 
clear head and an honest heart are worth more than all 
the law of all the lawyers. There was one good thing 
said at the Bar. It was from one Shakespeare, an Eng- 
lish player, I believe. No matter, it is good enough al- 
most to be in the Bible. It is this : * Be just and fear 
not.' It is our business to do justice between the parties, 
not by any quirks of the law out of Coke or Blackstone, 
books that I have never read and never will, but by com- 
mon sense and by common honesty, as between man and 
man. That is our business, and the curse of God is upon 
us if we neglect or evade or turn aside from it." 

Judge , of Georgia, was noted for the way he 

got mixed in his charges to the jury. On one occasion 
a case was tried before him, in which Smith had sued 
Jones upon a promissory note given for a horse. Jones's 
defense was failure of consideration, averring that at the 
time of purchase the horse had the glanders, of which he 
died, and that Smith knew it. Smith replied that the 
horse did not have the glanders, but the distemper, and 
that Jones knew it when he bought him. The judge 
charged the jury: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, you have already made one 
mistrial of this case because you did not pay attention 
to the charge of the court, and I don't want you to do 
it again. I intend to make it so clear that you cannot 
possibly make any mistake. This suit is upon a note 
given for a promissory horse. I hope you understand 
that. JSTow, if you find that at the time of the sale Smith 
had the glanders, and Jones knew it, Jones cannot re- 
cover. That is clear, gentlemen; I will state it again. 
If you find that at the time of the sale Jones had the dis- 
temper, and Smith knew it, then Smith cannot possibly 



80 WIT AND HUMOR 

recover. But, gentlemen, I will state it a third time, so 
that you cannot possibly make a mistake. If at the time 
of the sale Smith had the glanders, and Jones had the 
distemper, and the horse knew it, then neither Smith, 
Jones, nor the horse can recover." 

The following charge was given to an Indiana jury: 
" If you find from the evidence that the defendant said, 
when speaking of this money, with reference to himself 
and Nan, his wife, that ' we got it ' ; that ' we got it the 
night Uncle Jackey Martin's wife lay a corpse ' ; that 
Uncle Jackey Martin had between three and four thou- 
sand dollars stolen the night his wife lay a corpse ; and 
in attempting to account for these statements, or any of 
them, the defendant said, with reference to how they got 
it, that ' Nan got the keys and unlocked the trunk, and 
took out the comfort and handed it out through a window 
to me' ; and if you also find that this money was kept 
in a comfort, and that the comfort was kept in a trunk, 
and the trunk had keys, — then you have a right to make 
the following inquiries, and ascertain from the evkk .. e, 
if you can, whether or not Uncle Jackey Martin's wife 
ever lay a corpse ; whether or not he ever kept any money 
in a comfort ; whether or not he kept the comfort in a 
trunk ; whether or not he kept the trunk locked ; where 
he kept the trunk ; where he kept the keys to that trunk, 
if any; what opportunities, if any, the defendant or Nan 
Dean had to know of Uncle Jackey Martin having any 
money ; what opportunities they had of knowing whether 
or not he kept it in a comfort, and, if so, where he kept 
the comfort, and, if he kept the comfort in a trunk, where 
was the trunk the night Martin's wife lay a corpse ; and 
whether John Dean and Nan Dean had opportunity of 
access to said trunk on that night; and whether or not 
they had, or either of them had, access to the keys of the 



BENCH AND BAR. 81 

zrunk ; and the length of time after such opportunity, if 
any, until such statements were made ; and the probabil- 
ity of such statements having been made unless they were 
true. And if you find from the evidence, beyond a rea- 
sonable doubt, that such statements were made, and they 
were true, and that it occurred in Sullivan county, Indi- 
ana, within two years before the commencement of this 
action, your plain duty is to find the defendant guilty." 
The only thing the jury seems to have gathered from 
the charge was, that it was its plain duty to find the de- 
fendant guilty, which it accordingly did. 

A Georgia justice of the peace once took upon himself 
to charge a jury: "Gentlemen, this is a case which has 
been tried by me before, and I decided in favor of the 
defendant." As the jury took the hint and found for the 
defendant just as the justice had done before, although 
the evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of the plaint- 
iff, the higher court refused to let the verdict stand. It 
also commented as follows: 

" A justice of the peace is generally a man of conse- 
quence in his neighborhood ; he writes the wills, draws 
the deeds, and pulls the teeth of the people; also he per- 
forms divers surgical operations on the animals of his 
neighbors. The justice has played his part on the busy 
stage of life from the time of Mr. Justice Shallow down 
to the time of Mr. Justice Kiggins. Who has not seen 
the gaping, listening crowd assembled around his honor, 
the justice, on tiptoe to catch the words of wisdom as 
they fell from his venerated lips ? 

" ' And still they gazed, 

And still the wonder grew, 
That one small head 
Could carry all he knew.' " 



82 WIT AND HUMOR 

Maule said to a jury in a larceny case : " If a man goes 
into the London Docks sober, without the means of get- 
ting drunk, and comes out of one of the cellars wherein 
are a million gallons of wine, very drunk, I think that 
would be reasonable evidence that he had stolen some of 
the wine in the cellar, though you could not prove that 
any wine was stolen or wine missed." 

Choate, Joseph H Choate, of New York— a great 

leader of the bar, and a bright after-dinner speaker — 
possesses a fine wit and a polished humor. His fame as 
an after-dinner speaker was mainly won by the remark- 
able addresses at the dinners of the New England Society, 
of which he has often been elected President, those gather- 
ings, as he calls them, " of an unhappy company of Pil- 
grims, who meet annually at Delmonico's to drown the 
sorrows and sufferings of their ancestors in the flowing 
bowl, and to contemplate their own virtues in the mirror 
of history." 

Perhaps one of the best of his brief remarks was his 
toast to the fair sex. "And then, Women — the better 
half of the Yankee world — at whose tender summons 
even the stern Pilgrims were ever ready to spring to arms, 
and without whose aid they never could have achieved 
the historic title of the Pilgrim fathers. The Pilgrim 
mothers were more devoted martyrs than were the Pil- 
grim fathers, because they not only had to bear the same 
hardships, but they had to bear with the Pilgrim fathers 
besides." 

Choate was master of ceremonies at a banquet at which 
Chauncey M. Depew and Horace Porter were twin stars. 
Choate's face fairly beamed with delight as he rose to ex- 
tend a greeting: 

" I am sure you would not allow me to quote this pleas- 



BENCH AND BAR. 83 

ing programme if I did not felicitate you upon the pres- 
ence of two other gentlemen — those twin-rail fellows, 
well met at every festive board, without whom no ban- 
quet is ever complete. I mean, of course, Mr. Depew and 
General Porter. Their splendid efforts on a thousand 
fields like this have fairly won their golden spurs. 

u I forget whether it was Pythagoras or Emerson who 
finally decided that the soul of mankind is located in the 
stomach, but these two gentlemen, certainly, by their 
achievements on such arenas as this, have demonstrated 
that the pyloric orifice is the shortest cut to the human 
brain. Their well-won title of the first of dinner orators 
is the true survival of the fittest, for I assure you that 
would long ago have laid all the rest of us under the 
table, if not under the sod. And so I think in your names 
I may bid them welcome, thrice welcome — duo fulmina 
belli}' 

Choate has no fear of those above him in authority. 
He carries his suave manner and absolute independence 
into the very teeth of judges and juries. An excellent 
example of this happened before Justice Yan Brunt, who 
had a habit, often distressing to members of the bar, par- 
ticularly young ones, of talking to his associates on the 
bench while the lawyers were delivering their arguments. 
As often as he had exasperated attorneys none of them 
had ever had the temerity to complain. Choate was about 
to make the closing argument in a highly important case. 
Forty minutes had been allotted him for the purpose. 
He had scarcely uttered a dozen words when Judge Van 
Brunt wheeled about in his chair and began talking to 
Judge Andrews. Choate ceased speaking immediately, 
folded his arms and gazed steadily at the judges, his hand- 
some face a trifle paler than usual. A hush fell upon the 
court-room. Judge Yan Brunt, noticing the stillness, 



84 WIT AND HUMOR. 

turned around and looked inquiringly at the silent advo 
cate. 

" Your Honor," said Choate, " I have just forty min- 
utes in which to make my final argument. I shall not 
only need every second of that time to do it justice, but 
I shall also need your undivided attention." 

" And you shall have it," promptly responded the judge, 
at the same time acknowledging the justice of the rebuke 
by a faint flush on his cheeks. It was an exhibition of 
genuine courage much appreciated by members of the 
profession. 

When Choate was questioned regarding the secret of 
success, he turned upon his interviewer and asked him to 
" define success." The latter answered, " The acquisition 
of wealth, ease, comfort and reputation." But Choate 
replied, " Many men succeed without winning any one of 
these, and character is the vital thing, after all. Other- 
wise, there is nothing to choose between honorable fame 
and mere notoriety, and Benedict Arnold would rank on 
a par with Washington, or Jeffries with Chief Justice 
Marshall." 

One of Choate's wittiest sayings was made over a pri- 
vate dinner table at which he and Mrs. Choate were 
guests. Some one inquired of him who he would like to 
be if he could not be himself. He paused a few seconds, 
as if thinking over the list of the world's celebrities, and 
then his eye rested upon his wife: "If I could not be 
myself, I should like to be Mrs. Choate's second husband." 

Who will forget Choate's adaptation of Mother Goose 
in the great Yan Wyck-Tracy-Low campaign of 1897, at 
Carnegie Hall ? Choate took the stump for Low. The 
Republican machine was determined on but one thing — 
that Low should not be elected — and was aiding Yan 



BENCH AND BAR. 85 

Wyck, Mr. Croker's candidate, in every way. Pausing 
in his description of the alliance between the two great 
political parties, Choate quoted: 

Tom Piatt 

Could eat no fat, 

Croker could eat no lean, 

And so between them both, 

I quoth, 

They licked the platter clean. 

In the million dollar Hurlbert inheritance case, Choate 
tangled up a witness in a maze of contradictions, finally 
saying: "Then you told a falsehood simply because you 
thought it customary, eh ? ' 

" Well, if you keep forcing me, I will have to keep 
going in a circle to explain," answered Mr. Hurlbert. 

"Go ahead," retorted Choate, "I'll follow you to the 
end." 

" To the end of a circle ? " murmered Lawyer Parsons, 
Choate's opponent. 

But Choate retaliated the next day, when a witness 
testified that the Hurlbert family had family prayers 
morning and night. " Family prayers ? " repeated Par- 
sons, in a questioning tone. " Family prayers," repeated 
the witness. 

" Yes," continued Choate; " don't you know what they 
are, Brother Parsons ? " 

Choate is a fine Shakesperian scholar. Once he and 
Roscoe Conkling were pitted against each other, in the 
Huntington railroad suit. Choate had nettled Conkling, 
and Conkling retorted by reading in court a most flam- 
boyant and flattering description of Choate, printed in 
a newspaper. The court and jury were convulsed with 
Conkling's comments. Quick as a flash Choate said he 
would let the description go without objection if the court 



86 WIT AND HUMOR. 

would permit him to file for his side an exhibit of Conk 
ling, drawn by immortal pen, and quoted off-hand from 
Shakespeare : 

See what a grace is seated on this brow; 
Hyperion's curl, the front of Jove himself; 
An eye, like Mars, to threaten and command — 
A combination and a form indeed, 
Where every god did seem to set his seal, 
To give the world assurance of a man. 

Choate's address at the unveiling of the statue of Eufus 
Choate, in Boston, is an eloquent tribute to the memory 
of the latter : 

" He came of a long line of pious and devout ancestors, 
whose living was as plain as their thinking was high. It 
was from father and mother that he derived the flame of 
intellect, the glow of spirit, and the beauty of tempera- 
ment that were so unique. 

"And his nurture to manhood was worthy of the child. 
It was ' the nurture and admonition of the Lord.' From 
that rough pine cradle, which is still preserved in the 
room where he was born, to his premature grave, at the 
age of fifty-nine, it was one long course of training and 
discipline of mind and character, without pause or rest. 
It began with that well-thumbed and dog's-eared Bible 
from Hog Island, its leaves actually worn away by the 
pious hands that had turned them, read daily in the fam- 
ily from January to December, in at Genesis and out at 
Revelation every two years. 

"And upon this solid rock of the Scriptures he built a 
magnificent structure of knowledge and acquirement, to 
which few men in America have ever attained. . . . 
His splendid and blazing intellect, fed and enriched by 
constant study of the best thoughts of the great minds of 
the race, his all-persuasive eloquence, his teeming and 
radiant imagination, whirling his hearers along with it, 



BENCH AND BAR. 8T 

and sometimes overpowering himself, his brilliant and 
sportive fancy, lighting up the most arid subjects with 
the glow of sunrise, his prodigious and never-failing mem- 
ory, and his playful wit, always bursting forth with irre- 
sistible impulse, have been the subject of scores of essays 
and criticisms, all struggling with the vain effort to de- 
scribe and crystallize the fascinating and magical charm 
of his speech and his influence." 

The price paid for his success is described in these words : 
" Think of a man already walking the giddy heights of 
assured success, already a Senator of the United States 
from Massachusetts, or even years afterward, when the 
end of his professional labors was already in sight, school- 
ing himself to daily tasks in law, rhetoric and oratory, 
seeking always for the actual truth, and for the ' best 
language' in which to embody it — the 'precisely one 
right word ' by which to utter it, — think of such a man, 
with all his ardent taste for the beautiful in every domain 
of human life, going through the grinding work of taking 
each successive volume of the Massachusetts Keports as 
they came out, down to the last year of his practice, and 
making a brief in every case in which he had not been 
himself engaged, with new researches to see how he might 
have presented it, and thus keeping up with the procession 
of the law. Yerily ' all things are full of labor; man can- 
not utter it ; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the 
ear filled with hearing.' " 

Choate, Rufus. — Choate's eloquence was unique, bril- 
liant, fascinating, indescribable. To every subject and 
effort he brought his full power of thought and feeling, 
of imagination and wit. The dullest and driest theme he 
invested with interest, and illuminated by the lights which 
he flashed upon it from all sources. His logic was con- 



88 WIT AND HUMOR. 

cealed by the profusion of graceful imagery, but whoever 
attempted to break the chain was sure to find links of 
steel beneath the garland of flowers. His mind was deeply 
reverential towards God. He died in the full strength of 
his powers, untouched by age, in the fullness of his fame, 
and in the midst of universal love and respect 

We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the 
flag and keep step to the music of the Union. — Letter to 
the Whig Convention. 

Dr. Storrs studied law in Choate's office, and says of 
him: 

I never knew of a mind of such compass as his, so en- 
ergetic and so affluent, which heated so quickly. It was 
like a superb Corliss engine, driven for days with a bushel 
of coal. The mere attrition of any case, where the facts 
were in doubt and the principles obscure, was enough 
to set his whole force in activity. . . . Weakness, 
languor, sickness itself, vanished before this invincible 
spirit. Haggard, wan, after a night of sleepless suffer- 
ing, his throat sore, his head throbbing, swathed in flan- 
nels, buried under overcoats, with wrappings around his 
neck, a bandage on his knee, a blister on his chest, when 
he rose for his argument, all facts reported by witnesses 
in the case, all the related and governing precedents, all 
legal principles bearing upon it, all passages of history, 
letters, life, that might illustrate his argument or con- 
found his antagonist's, seemed visibly present in his mind. 
He thought of nothing but jury and verdict. His elo- 
quence was then as completely independent of technical 
rule as are screams of passion or the shouts of a mob. 
He was after a favorable decision of a case as if his own 
life depended on it. Short, sharp, shattering w r ords rat- 
tled like volleys before and after resounding sentences. 



BENCH AND BAR. 89 

Language heaped on his lips. Images, delicate, homely, 
startling, blazed upon his pictured words. The common 
court-room became a scene of the most astonishing intel- 
lectual action. Judge Shaw looked at him as he might 
have looked at the firm-set heavens, glittering with me- 
teors. The farmers, mechanics, traders, on the jury, were 
seized, swept forward, stormed upon, with an utterance 
so unbounded in variety and energy, sometimes so pa- 
thetic, sometimes so quaint, sometimes so grotesque, al- 
ways so controlling and impellent, as only his hearers 
ever had heard. The velocity of his speech was almost 
unparalleled, yet the poise of his mind was as undis- 
turbed as that of the planet; and each vague doubt, in 
either mind, was recognized and combated, unconscious 
prejudices were delicately conciliated, each tendency to- 
ward his view of the case was encouraged and confirmed, 
each leaning toward his opponent was found out and 
fought, with a skill which other men toiled after in vain, 
which seemed in him a strange inspiration. 

Choate became the actor in the cause — throwing his 
whole soul into the issue. But there his duty ended ; and 
there, with the trial over, its worries were cast aside and 
forgotten. " I sometimes feel," he said, " when a case has 
gone against me, like the Baptist minister who was bap- 
tizing a crowd of converts through a hole in the ice. One 
brother — Jones, I think — disappeared after immersion, 
and did not re-appear; probably drifted ten or fifteen 
feet from the hole, and was vainly gasping under ice as 
many inches thick. After pausing a few minutes, the 
minister said : ' Brother Jones has evidently gone to king- 
dom come : bring on the next.' Now, I am not unfeeling ; 
but after all has been done for a client that I could do, — 
and I never spared myself in advocating his legal rights, — 
the only thing left for me is to dismiss the case from my 



90 WIT AND HUMOR. 

mind, and to say with my Baptist brother, ' Bring on the- 
next.'" 

That this habit of mind was entirely disconnected from 
any languid abandonment of the cause of his client while 
there was the slightest hope of saving him, is humorously 
shown in a letter which Professor Brown publishes in his 
biography, relating to a cause decided against his clients 
by the Supreme Court at Washington. " The court," he 
wrote to the Washington lawyer engaged with him in 
the cause, " has lost its little wits. Please let me have 
(a) our brief — for the law; (b) the defendant's brief — 
for the sophistry; (c) the opinion — for the foolishness; 
and never say die." 

The august Supreme Court of the United States, which 
Choate was accustomed publicly to celebrate as the per- 
fection of wisdom and equity, was never so disrespectfully 
treated as in this deliciously impudent private letter. The 
humor of it could hardly have been exceeded by Swift, 
Sterne, or Sydney Smith. 

Choate occasionally used an expression so whimsical as 
to convulse the court. It was caught up and passed from 
one to another as current coin. The more grotesque the 
utterance, the better for the gossips, the more certain to- 
give the public exaggerated notions of his method and 
style. Yet it was well to expose a fallacy by some incisive 
word, an epithet or epigram, when that could be clone 
effectively. It saved time and made the error significant. 
When a State line was proposed, with landmarks of an 
unstable character — a couple of stones by a pond, and a 
buttonwood sapling in a village — it may have been per- 
tinent to say that "the commissioners might as well have 
defined it as starting from a blue-jay, thence to a swarm 
of bees in hiving time, and thence to five hundred foxes- 
with firebrands tied to their tails." 



BENCH AND BAR. 91 

Of Judge Shaw, the distinguished but gruff chief jus- 
tice of Massachusetts, Choate remarked that the bar re- 
garded him as the East Indians did their wooden god: 
"They know that he is ugly, but they feel that he is 
great." 

When told that the next edition of Worcester's Dic- 
tionary would contain twenty-five hundred new words, 
the same chief justice exclaimed: 

"For Heaven's sake, don't let Choate get hold of it!" 
alluding to the extraordinary amplitude of the great ad- 
vocate's style. 

On his election to Congress, Choate was asked by a 
lady why Mrs. Choate did not accompany him to Wash- 
ington. 

" I assure you, Madam," he replied, " that I have spared 
no pains to induce her to come. I have even offered to 
pay half her expenses." 

" Choate's wit and humor," says the Hon. M. H. Car- 
penter, " were all the more effective from the fact that 
God never put upon a man, except perhaps Lincoln, so 
sad a face. During all the time I was with him, his 
health was more or less disturbed, and his face was elo- 
quently expressive of constant anguish. Many a time I 
have seen him come into the office from the court room, 
the personification of weariness and sorrow, so much so 
that often merely looking in his face has forced the moist- 
ure to my eyes. But the tear never reached my cheek 
before he would set me laughing with some quaint re- 
mark. I remember his coming into the office and telling 
me that the Supreme Court of Massachusetts had just de- 
cided an important case against him, evidently to his 
great surprise. He threw down some books and papers 
on his desk, and after telling me of the decision, added 



92 WIT AND HUMOR 

in a half-serious, half-playful way: ' Every judge on that 
bench seems to be more stupid than every other one; and 
if I were not afraid of losing the good opinion of the 
court, I would impeach the whole batch of them.' Yet, 
notwithstanding such badinage, his reverence for the 
court, and especially for Chief Justice Shaw, was un- 
bounded." 

When blamed for endangering his constitution by 
ceaseless overwork, Choate replied: 

" Good heavens, my dear fellow ! my constitution was 
all gone years ago, and I'm living on the by-laws." 

Of a lawyer known to be as contentious as he was dull- 
witted, Choate said: 
" He's a bull-dog, with confused ideas." 

Choate rarely failed to show mental supremacy any- 
where, and generally came off with flying colors from 
any play of wit with judge, lawyer or witness, but oc- 
casionally found his match and was silenced. 

In an important assault and battery case at sea, Dick 
Barton, chief mate of the clipper ship Challenge, was on 
the stand, and Choate badgered him so for about an hour 
that Dick got his salt water up, and hauled by the wind 
to bring the keen Boston lawyer under his batteries. 

At the beginning of his testimony Dick said : " The 
night was dark and rainy." 

Suddenly Choate asked him: 

"Was there a moon that night?" 

"Yes, sir." 

" Ah, yes ! a moon " — 

" Yes, a full moon." 

" Did you see it ? " 

"No, sir." 

" Then how do you know there was a moon ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 93 

* The ' Nautical Almanac ' said so, and I will believe 
that sooner than any lawyer in the world." 

"What was the principal luminary that night?" 

"Binnacle lamp aboard the Challenge." 

" Ah ! you are growing sharp, Mr. Barton." 

" What in blazes have you been grinding me this hour 
for — to make me dull?" 

" Be civil, sir ! And now tell me in w T hat latitude and 
longitude you crossed the equator." 

" Oh, you're joking ! " 

"]STo, sir, I am in earnest, and I desire an answer." 

"Which is more than I can give." 

" Indeed ! You are the chief mate of a clipper ship, 
and unable to answer so simple a question ? " 

" Yes ! — the simplest question I ever had asked me. 
I thought every fool of a lawyer knew there is no latitude 
at the equator." 

That shot silenced the great lawyer. 

Choate had no false pride of opinion, and could laugh 
at his own mistakes as readily as others. After witness- 
ing in court one day, with two or three others, the queer 
rulings of a certain judge who had made himself some- 
what conspicuous in his mode of conducting trials, one of 
them turned to him and said, " Let us see, did you not join 
in a petition to have this man appointed?" "Headed 
it," said Choate, with the quietest possible humor. 

Choate, whose success with juries was phenomenal, used 
to say : " Carry the jury at all hazards ; move heaven and 
earth to carry the jury, and then fight it out with the 
judges on the law questions as best you can." 

In an important mercantile case in which Choate was 
counsel, the jury was composed mostly of farmers and 
drovers drawn from the western part of Massachusetts, 



94 WIT AND HUMOR. 

and it was feared that they would hardly be capable o\ 
doing justice to the merits of a complicated commercial 
transaction, the very phrases and figures of which they 
were necessarily incompetent to apprehend. His anxious 
client, just before the trial began, asked him what he 
thought would be the verdict. " Oh," he replied; "the 
law on our side is as strong as thunder, but " — with a 
slight shrug of his shoulders — "what those bovine and 
bucolic gentlemen from Berkshire may say, God only 
knows ! " 

When a witness, described himself as a " candle of the 
Lord — a Baptist minister," Choate replied: 

" Then you are a dipped, but I hope not a wick-ed, can- 
dle." 

At the trial of a cashier of one of the Eoston banks, 
charged with embezzlement, Choate, defending, argued 
that the cashier was compelled to do what he had done 
by his superior officers, the directors; that they had swin- 
dled the public and should suffer the punishment. He 
was proceeding to flay the directors, when one of them 
in court, in great anger, began to denounce Choate, who, 
hardly allowing himself to be interrupted, said mildly : 

"I beg the director to be seated, as he wishes to be 
treated with moderation in a court of justice." 

And then, instantly breaking into a scream, and with 
the greatest impetuosity, Choate exclaimed : 

" I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, my client was as 
helpless in the hands of these directors as an infant sur- 
rounded by ten thousand Bengal tigers ! " 

Churchill, Lord.— When Lord Kandolph Churchill 
was last in the United States, he visited Philadelphia; 
.and, while collecting statistics relating to the state pris- 



BENCH AND BAR. 95 

0ns of Pennsylvania, be was referred to the head of the 
State Prisons Board, Mr. Cadwalader Biddle. Before 
calling on Biddle, however, Lord Kandolph fell into the 
hands of some wags of the Union League Club. 

" You've got the name wrong," said one of these merry 
jesters; "it's not Cadwalader Biddle, but Bidcallader 
Waddle." 

"Don't mind what he says, Lord Kandolph," exclaimed 
another; "the real name is Wadbillader Caddie." 

A third member took the ex-Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer aside and imparted to him in confidence that he 
was being gulled on all sides. 

" The actual name," confided his false friend, is " Did- 
bollader Widdle." 

And when Lord Kandolph drove to the Prisons Board 
that afternoon, he was so much upset that he stammered : 

" Will you take this card into Mr. Bid-cad-wid-wad- 
did-dollader, what's his name ? I mean the chief of the 
Board, but I forgot his extraordinary nomenclatural com- 
bination." 

Clare, Lord. — An Irish barrister, pleading before 
Lord Clare, got hopelessly mixed over a metaphor in 
which he had introduced an eagle, and at length had ab- 
ruptly to stop. 

" The next time, sir," said the chancellor, " that you 
bring an eagle into court, I recommend you to clip his 
wings." 

It was of Lord Clare that Curran, who was a political 
antagonist, said that he reminded him of a chimney-sweep, 
who had raised himself by dark and dusky ways, and 
then called aloud to his neighbors to witness his dirty 
elevation. 



96 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Clay, Henry. — Clay was the most popular man of 
his time. "To come within reach of the snare of his 
speech was to love him." He possessed a wonderful fac- 
ulty of putting at ease every man with whom he came 
into social intercourse. A party of gentlemen had come 
on as a committee of the citizens of one of the western 
cities, to present him a beautiful silver urn. They were 
received by Clay with his elegant hospitality, and invited 
to dinner, at which time it was arranged the presentation 
should take place. General McMunn, chairman of the 
committee, was appointed to make the presentation speech, 
which he had carefully committed to writing and to 
memory. Bracing himself with two or three extra glasses 
of wine, and rising to speak, he began: 

" Mr. Clay ." But the words refused to come. His 

embarrassment was not relieved by another glass; and 
when, in despair, he put his hand into his pocket and drew 
forth the manuscript, he was able to read it only in the 
most bungling style, to his own mortification and that of 
his friends. Clay responded ; and soon after, as McMunn 
was sitting next to him, Clay said to him: 

" What a pity it is, General, that you did not take to 
public speaking at an earlier period of life ; you have all 
the elements of a great orator." 

" Do you think so ? " gasped the General. 

" Certainly; all you need is practice" 

McMunn was delighted, and went home thinking that 
he and Clay were the two greatest men that ever lived. 

His loyal heart for the Union will shine for all time in 
the motto, "I know no North, no South, no East, no 
"West," and in other famous utterances. When Mr, Pres- 
ton, of Kentucky, told him that the compromise measures 
of 1850, which he advocated as a means of preserving the 



BENCH AND BAR. 97 

Union, would injure his chances for the Presidency, he 
replied: " I would rather be right than be President." In 
his senatorial speech on the compromise measures, he de- 
clared : " If Kentucky should to-morrow unfurl the ban- 
ner of resistance unjustly, I will never fight under that 
banner. I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole 
Union, — a subordinate one to my own State." And again 
he said : " The Senator speaks of Virginia being my coun- 
try. The Union, sir, is my country." 

To a dull, interminable Congressional member who said : 
" You speak for the present generation, but I speak for 
posterity," Clay replied : " It seems you are resolved to 
speak until your audience arrives." 

Clay disliked Buchanan of Pennsylvania. On a mem- 
orable occasion in the Senate, Clay made a studied attack 
upon the Democrats, and especially upon General Jack- 
son. Buchanan having replied in a vigorous style, Clay, 
rising, sarcastically remarked, " that he had made no 
allusion to the Senator from Pennsylvania. He was re- 
ferring to the leaders^ not to the subordinates, of the Dem- 
ocracy." 

Clay was addressing an immense crowd in Nashville. 
The distinguished Democratic statesman, Felix Grundy, 
resided there. He had a great reputation as a lawyer in 
criminal cases, and was eminently successful in their de- 
fence. At this time, however, he was away on an elec- 
tioneering tour in support of the Democratic party. 

" I had hoped," said Clay, " when I came to Nashville, 
to have the pleasure of meeting and renewing my acquaint- 
ance with my old friend Grundy; but I understand that 
he is in East Tennessee, at his old business — defending 
criminals" 
7 



98 WIT AND HUMOR. 

A single piece of ready wit, which saved Clay from 
overwhelming defeat at a critical moment, affords an ex- 
cellent example of the demands made upon the stump 
speaker. 

In 1816 Clay voted for a new compensation act of Con- 
gress. It aroused a tornado of popular wrath. Not even 
the great Commoner could stand against this, and he saga- 
ciously resolved to try and weather it. Meeting a stanch 
supporter who had turned against him, he said, " Jack, 
you have a good flint-lock, haven't you ?" 

" Yes." 

" Did it ever flash in the pan ? " 

" Once it did, but only once." 

" What did you do with it ? Did you throw it away ? " 
T "No, I picked the flint, and tried it again." 

"Well," said Clay, " I have only flashed once, — on this 
compensation bill, — and are you going to throw me 
away ? " 

" No, Clay, I will pick the flint and try you again." 

When all else failed, a simple illustration, drawn from 
e very-day life, sufficed to reach those brave and hardy 
frontiersmen. 

Sam Long, well known as a clown, used to relate a story 
exhibiting Clay's humor in a pleasant light: 

" I remember once we entered Lexington in procession, 
and it happened that Mr. Clay was driving in at the same 
time. I brought up the rear of the procession, riding a 
mule. As he was directly behind me, I turned my face 
to the mule's tail, and sang out : ' Here we are, fellow- 
citizens, Wisdom led by Folly ! ' The people shouted, and 
Mr. Clay seemed greatly amused. Next day at the circus 
I made him a speech, in which I advised him to be Presi- 
dent of the United States, and take me into his cabinet. 



BENCH AND BAR. 99 

That night he sent me a bottle of the finest wine I ever 
tasted, with his compliments, saying: 

" From the poorest fool to the best clown in the United 
States." 

Cleveland, Grover. — Among the friends of Grover 
Cleveland, when he was practicing law in Buffalo, was 
another attorney, but one of rather different stamp fro n 
the man of destiny. The friend was a bright fellow, but 
with the bump of laziness abnormally developed. He 
was not a well-read lawyer, and whenever it was neces- 
sary for him to use a decision bearing on any point it was 
his habit to lounge into Cleveland's office and casually 
worm the desired information out of his friend's mental 
storehouse. " Grover " was not so dull as not to appre- 
ciate the fact and to resent the sponging — not so much 
because the process was worthy of that name as because 
he wished to spur his friend on to more energetic work. 
One day the friend came in on his usual errand, and 
when Cleveland had heard the preliminaries usual to the 
pumping process, the latter told his questioner that he 
had given him all the information on law matters that 
he was going to. " There are my books," said Cleveland, 
" and you're quite welcome to use them. You can read 
up your own cases." 

" See here, Grover Cleveland, I want you to under- 
stand that I don't read law. I practice entirely by ear, 
and you and your books can go to thunder." 

Returning from a hunting trip down on the coast of 
North Carolina, Cleveland brought with him a lot of 
game which he distributed among the members of his 
Cabinet and other friends. For Mr. Thurber, his private 
secretary, he selected an old buzzard that had been acci- 



100 WIT AND HUMOR. 

dentally shot, and sent it to the latter's house with a 
pleasant little note, asking if Thurber would be kiud 
enough to accept a rare specimen of wild turkey with the 
President's compliments. Thurber was very grateful, 
and invited some friends to dine with him on the Presi- 
dent's turkey. The bird was brought upon the table, and 
turned the edge of the knife when Thurber attempted to 
carve it. It was as tough as an old tin trunk, and, after 
many heroic attempts on Thurber's part to cut off a feAv 
slices, was sent back to the kitchen. 

The next morning when Thurber appeared at the "White 
House, the President greeted him cheerfully and asked 
how he liked that turkey. 

"It was delicious," responded Thurber, "perfectly de- 
licious. We had some friends in to dine with us, and they 
all pronounced it one of the tenderest and sweetest birds 
they had ever tasted." 

The President, fearing to lose the joke, told the story to 
several of his Cabinet. P>ut Thurber was too much for 
them. He insisted to the very end of the Administration 
that the bird the President sent him was fit for an epicure, 
and that he never enjoyed a dinner so much. By-and-by 
the incident developed a proverb, and the President used 
to remark that this, that or the other thing was "as fine 
as Thurber's turkey." 

Climax, Anti. — The inferior tribunals, whose magis- 
trates reel most keenly the glory of a little brief authority, 
frequently offer excellent examples of anti-climax. A 
famous story is that of the London " beak " who made 
this tremendous appeal to a witness about to take the 
oath : 

"Remember that the eyes of God and of Her Majesty's 
police court are upon you." 



BENCH AND BAR. 101 

Equally famous is the exordium of another justice's 
charge to a jury in a case of larceny: 

"For forty centuries the thunders of Sinai have echoed 
through the world, ' Thou shalt not steal.' This is also a 
principle of the common law and a rule of equity." 

Cockburn, Lord. — It is bad enough when common 
folks indulge in a temper fit, but what shall be said when 
great men make a like exhibition of themselves? Sir 
Alexander Cockburn and Sir Edwin Landseer were dining 
at a table where the conversation was varied and cheer- 
ful. Sir Alexander was lord chief justice of England and 
Sir Edwin was perhaps the most eminent English artist 
of his time. Some one spoke of Shakespeare, and Land- 
seer remarked that the poet had made a mistake in caus- 
ing his hunted stag to shed "big round tears." "Now," 
said he, "I have made stags my special study, and I know 
that it is quite impossible for them to shed tears." Most 
of the guests were inclined to accept this as an innocent 
if not very valuable commentary, but Cockburn turned 
upon the speaker and asked him in a loud voice: 

" And you don't think you are committing a most un- 
warrantable impertinence in criticising Shakespeare ? " 

The explosion of*a bomb could not have created greater 
dismay. Landseer, the most sensitive of mortals, turned 
pale, and Cockburn continued to glare at him. The host, 
as soon as possible, broke up the party and bundled his 
quarrelsome guests off into the garden. Now came another 
difficulty. The house was six miles from town, and, as it 
was Sunday evening, no cabs were to be had. Landseer 
must return in Cockburn's carriage. To that end the host 
made every possible effort to bring about a reconciliation. 
He entreated the artist to forget and forgive : 

" Kemember, Sir Edwin," said he, " that long after he 



102 WIT AND HUMOR. 

has joined all the other chief justices and is forgotten, 
your name will remain as that of the greatest English 
painter of this or any other age." 

" That's true," said Sir JEdwin, " and I am willing to 
make it up and ride home with him. But he'd better 
know that if he begins again I'm the man to get down, 
take off my coat and fight him in the lanes." 

Then the lord chief justice was told that Landseer was 
willing to shake hands and go home with him. 

" I won't take him ! " said he curtly, and drove away 
alone. 

In his " Circuit Journeys," Cockburn tells many amus- 
ing stories regarding the cases which came before him. 
Speaking of the trial of several women, he mentions that 
he was greatly diverted by overhearing the opinion enter- 
tained by one of the accused of himself and his learned 
colleague. The virago remarked to one of her associates 
in the dock: 

"Two auld gray-headed blackguards. They gie us 
plenty o' their law, but deevilish little yoostice." 

Cockburn had been detained one day in court much 
beyond the usual hour, by the dull prosing of an advocate. 
A friend meeting the judge afterwards, said that the ad- 
vocate was certainly inclined to be tedious. 

" Tedious ! " exclaimed Cockburn, " he not only exhausts 
time, but encroaches on eternity." 

Cockburn, after a long stroll, sat down on a hillside 
beside a shepherd, and observed that the sheep selected 
the coldest situation for lying down. 

" Mac," said he, " I think if I were a sheep I should 
certainly have preferred the other side of that hill." 

The shepherd answered : 

" Ay, my lord ; but if ye had been a sheep ye would 
have had mair sense." 



BENCH AND BAR. 103 

Cockburn, when at the bar, defended a Scotchman for 
murder. A long and eloquent fight was in vain. Sen- 
tence of death was passed. Then began the condemned 
Scotchman to abuse his counsel : 

"I ha' nae got justice the day," he declared. 

" Possibly not, but you'll get it in a fortnight," was the 
crushing reply. 

Coke, Sir Edward.— The gladsome light of juris- 
prudence. First Institute. 

Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no 
sovereign. 

When the judges were asked if they ought not to stay 
proceedings until his Majesty had consulted them in a 
case where he believed his prerogative or interests con- 
cerned, and required them to attend him for their advice, 
all the judges except Coke answered in the affirmative. 
He proudly replied : 

" When the case happens, I shall do that which shall 
be fit for a judge to do." 

Coleman, Richard H.— Judge Coleman, of Vir- 
ginia, was a judicial officer of no ordinary merit, but his 
ability was rather of the solid than brilliant order. He 
was not, so to speak, " cut out " for an orator. His de- 
livery was not fluent, but rather hesitating, and not so 
happy as that of others with more turn for elocution. A 
hardened criminal was tried before him, and by over- 
whelming testimony convicted of murder in the first 
degree. The judge, departing from his custom of pro- 
nouncing sentence in the briefest manner, indulged in 
something like a moral lecture, concluding with great 
solemnity in the usual manner, " That you be then and 
there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may 



104 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Almighty God, in his infinite goodness, have mercy on 
your soul." 

The criminal, on his way to the jail, turned to the sheriff 
and said, with the most contemptuous expression of 
countenance and manner: 

" Did you ever hear such stuff and nonsense as that 
man talked to me, in all your born days ? " 

"Why," replied the astonished and shocked official, 
" I think he gave you most excellent advice, and you 
ought to employ the balance of your days in thinking of 
and trying to follow it." 

" Pshaw ! " exclaimed the convict, " Everybody knows 
Dick Coleman ain't no public speaker." 

Coleridge, Lord. — It is related that Coleridge sprang 
into eminence as a lawyer by adroitly seizing a simple 
incident while pleading the cause of a man on trial for 
murder. In the course of his long argument, a candle 
in the jury box flickered and went out, leaving the court- 
room in darkness. He stopped speaking, and the silence 
in court for a moment was oppressive. The scene, with 
its dark shadows, its grim faces, the scarlet robes of the 
judge, and the haggard face of the murderer, was worthy 
of Rembrandt. The usher replaced the light, and Cole- 
ridge resumed his address : 

" Gentlemen of the jury, you have a solemn duty to dis- 
charge. The life of the prisoner at the bar is in your 
hands. You can take it — by a word. You can extinguish 
that life as the candle by your side was extinguished a 
moment ago. But it is not in your power, it is not in the 
power of any of us — of any one in the court or out of 
it, — to restore that life, when once taken, as that light 
has been restored." 

The tone in which the words were spoken, the cadence 



BENCH AND BAR. 105 

of the voice and the action of the orator, with the inspi- 
ration of the scene and the hour, produced a thrilling 
effect. The jury acquitted the prisoner, and Coleridge's 
fortune was made. 

It was one of the delights of Coleridge to profess igno- 
rance of things supposed to be of common knowledge. In 
a newspaper libel action his lordship, in his most silvery 
tones, asked : 

"What is Truth?" 

" It is a newspaper, my lud," replied counsel. 

" Oh ! " said his lordship, preserving his simplicity and 
splendid gravity — " isn't that an entirely new definition ?" 

Coleridge, in a hearing before the court, wished to be 
informed of the meaning of the phrase " coming to grief; " 
Justice Lawrence had never heard the expression, " Going, 
Tommy Dodd;" and Lord Halsbury asked an explana- 
tion of " Old Ambiguity." This ignorance of what, out- 
side the judicial world, was common knowledge, sug- 
gested the following drama to the Referee: 

Scene : A Court of Justice. 

Witness: "I noticed that she had a black eye." 

Coleridge: "One moment. I don't quite follow you. 
What was the color of her other eye ? " 

Witness: " I mean*her husband had blackened her eye." 

Coleridge: " What an extraordinary thing to do ! Did 
he use paint or burnt cork or soot, or what ? " 

Witness: "No; I mean he fetched her one and that 
made her eye black." 

Coleridge : " Fetched her one ! I presume he fetched 
uer a black glass eye from a dealer in such articles ?" 

Counsel: "No, your lordship. The witness means that 
the woman was struck in the eye, and that the result was 
•discoloration of the adjacent flesh." 



106 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Coleridge: "O! Now I understand. " 
Witness : " She went out, and said, ' I'll be back in half 
a jiffy."' 

Coleridge: "I don't know what kind of a conveyance 
that is, but why didn't she come back in a whole one ? " 
Witness : " It isn't a conveyance, my Lord." 
Coleridge : " O, is it a — er — garment ? " 
Counsel : " No, your lordship. It is a common expres- 
sion for a short space of time." 

Coleridge: " Dear me ! How very confusing ! Go on." 
Witness: "She gave me a bob." 

Coleridge: "Dropped you a curtsey, you mean, eh?" 
Witness: "No, a shilling." 

Coleridge: " I never heard a shilling called a * bob ' be- 
fore. Go on." 

Witness: "And I took my hook." 
Coleridge: " You had brought a hook with you, then ? " 
Counsel : " He means he took his departure. Go on." 
Witness: "When I saw her again, she'd been on the 
booze." 

Coleridge: " Is that a river ? " 
Witness : " I mean she'd been drinking." 
Coleridge: "Then why didn't you say so?" 
Witness : " I saw a policeman, and I went up to him 
and said, ' I say, bobby — ' " 

Coleridge: "You knew the policeman intimately, 
then ? " 

Witness: "Never saw him before in my life." 
Coleridge: "And yet you knew his Christian name and 
addressed him by it in its most familiar form ? " 

Counsel: "A policeman is frequently called a bobby, 
my lord." 

Coleridge: " Dear me! I was not aware of it; I never 
heard the expression before." 



BENCH AND BAR. 107 

Counsel : " Great Scot S " 

Coleridge: (Looking inquiringly round the court) 
" Where ? I have heard so much of him, I should like to 
see him." 

Counsel: (To witness) "And you gave her in charge?" 

Witness : " Yes ; but the policeman said, ' What's your 
game ? ' " 

Coleridge: "What had you in your hand, then — a 
brace of pheasants, or a hare, or what ? " 

Counsel: " O, skittles ! " 

Coleridge : " O, that was the game ! But how could the 
witness be playing skittles in the street ? " 

Witness: (To counsel) " Lor' ! ain't he a treat ! " 

Counsel : " Yes. You'd better stand down till I get a 
sworn interpreter." 

Coleridge's delight in professing ignorance of things 
supposed to be of common knowledge recalls some par- 
allel instances in the judicial career of other judges: 

In a libel action by a lady journalist against Mr. Gil- 
bert a few years ago, Sir E. Clarke read from a book 
of the plaintiff a description of Chopin's " umber-shaded 
hair." Lord Russell of Killowen's face assumed a look 
of blank astonishment. " What shade ? " said he. 

" Umber-shaded," replied Sir Edward. 

" Yes, but what shade is that," pressed the Chief Jus- 
tice. 

The British jury could stand it no longer. " Brown, 
my lord — brown," they all cried with one voice ; and the 
case proceeded. 

Justice Ball, an Irish judge, was noted for his amusing 
manifestations of ignorance, but whether they were real 
or pretended has never been clearly established. He 
tried a case in which a man was indicted for robbery at 
the house of a poor widow. The first witness was the 



108 WIT AND HUMOR 

young daughter of the widow, who identified the pris- 
oner as the man who had entered the house and smashed 
her mother's chest. 

" Do you say that the prisoner at the bar broke your 
mother's chest?" said the judge in astonishment. 

" He did, my lord," answered the girl ; " he jumped on 
it till he smashed it entirely." 

The judge turned to the crown counsel and said, "How 
is this? Why is not the prisoner indicted for murder? 
If he smashed this poor woman's chest in the way the 
witness has described, he must surely have killed her." 

" But, my lord," said the counsel, " it was a wooden 
chest." 

Some men were indicted at the Cork Assizes for riot 
and assault before the same judge. The prisoners had 
beaten two laborers who were drawing turf from a bog 
belonging to an obnoxious landlord. One of the wit- 
nesses said, "As we came near to the bog we saw the 
prisoners fencing along the road." 

" Eh ! what do you say the prisoners were doing ? " 
asked Justice Ball. 

" Fencing, my lord." 

"With what?" 

" Spades and shovels, my lord." 

The judge, looking amazed, said to the crown counsel, 
"Can this be true? Am I to understand that peasants 
in this part of the country fence along the roads, using 
spades and shovels for foils ? " 

" I can explain it, my lord," said the counsel. " The 
prisoners were making a ditch, which we call a fence in 
this part of the country." 

Confession. — The following incident occurred at a 

session of the Circuit Court of Pike county, Mississippi : 
Jeff Davis, a " gentleman of color," was on trial under 



BENCH AND BAR. 109 

an indictment for stealing a pistol and one dollar from 
Samuel Bates, also colored. 

A jury was accepted, the indictment read, and the dis- 
trict attorney called the prosecuting witness, Bates, who, 
having been sworn, was asked to state the facts in the 
case. The witness began: 

" Las' Augus' I come home an' foun' my pistol an' a 
dollar gone outen my trunk where I lef 'em dat mornin' 
I seed Jeff dar, an' axed him who stole my pistol an' my 
dollar. He said " — 

Here the prisoner's counsel objected, and demanded that 
the court should make a preliminary inquiry whether the 
confession was extorted by threats or induced by prom- 
ises of benefits. This the district attorney resisted, and 
the matter was discussed learnedly and earnestly for three- 
quarters of an hour. Judge Chrisman decided that the 
inquiry was proper, and accordingly it was entered upon, 
the jury retiring. 

District Attorney to witness: "What threats, if any, 
did you make to Jeff ? " 

Answer. "None." 

District Attorney : " Did you make him any promises ? " 

Answer: "Yes." 

Here the prisoner's counsel insisted that the confession 
could not be received in evidence, and this question was 
discussed learnedly, earnestly and elaborately for an hour; 
at the end of which time the judge decided that he could 
not determine whether or not the confession was admis- 
sible unless he knew what the promises were. Examina- 
tion resumed : 

District Attorney to witness : " What did you promise 
him?" 

Answer : " I promised him ef he would give me de pistol 
I would let him have de dollar — dat was all." 



110 WIT AND HUMOR. 

On this state of facts the prisoner's counsel insisted thai 
the confession could not be admitted, and the district at- 
torney urged the contrary. After an animated discussion 
the judge ruled the confession could be received in evi- 
dence. 

The jury were brought in and placed in the box. Ex- 
amination resumed. The crowd had become interested 
and were listening with almost painful attention. 

District Attorney: "Well, what did Jeff say ?" 

Answer: " Said he didn't know anything about it." 

Contempt of Court.— In Thurtell v. Beaumont, Ser- 
geant Taddy, in examining a witness, asked him about 
something that happened " after the plaintiff had disap- 
peared from that neighborhood." Thereupon the presid- 
ing judge, Park, observed : 

" That is an improper question, and ought not to have 
been put." 

Sergeant Taddy: That is an imputation to which I 
will not submit. I am incapable of putting an improper 
■question to any witness. 

Mr. Justice Park: What imputation, sir? I desire you 
will not charge me with casting imputations. I say the 
question was not properly put, for the expression " to dis- 
appear " means " to leave clandestinely." 

Sergeant Taddy: I say it means no such thing. 

Mr. Justice Park: I hope I have some understanding 
left, and so far as that goes, the word certainly bore that 
interpretation, and was, therefore, improper. 

Sergeant Taddy: I never will submit to a rebuke of 
this kind. 

Mr. Justice Park : That is a very improper manner, sir, 
for a counsel to address the Bench in. 

Sergeant Taddy: And that is a very improper manner 
for a judge to address counsel in. 



BENCH AND BAR HI 

Mr. Justice Park: I protest, sir, you will compel me 
to do what is very disagreeable to me. (Kising with 
warmth.) 

Sergeant Taddy: Do what you like, my lord ! ("With 
equal warmth.) 

Mr. Justice Park. (Eesuming his seat.) "Well, I hope 
1 shall manifest the indulgence of a Christian judge. 

Sergeant Taddy: You may exercise your indulgence, 
or your power, in any way your lordship's discretion 
may suggest; it is a matter of perfect indifference to me. 

Mr. Justice Park : I have the functions of a judge to 
discharge, and in doing so I must not be reproved in this 
sort of way. 

Sergeant Taddy: And I have a duty to discharge as 
counsel, which I shall discharge as I think proper, with- 
out submitting to a rebuke from any quarter. 

(Here Mr. Sergeant Lens rose to interfere.) 

Sergeant Taddy: No, brother Lens! I must protest 
against the interference. 

Sergeant Lens: My brother Taddy, my lord, has been 
betrayed into some warmth. 

Sergeant Taddy : (Pulling back Sergeant Lens into his 
place.) I protest against any interference on my account ; 
I am quite prepared to answer for my own conduct. 

Mr. Justice Park: My brother Lens, sir, has a right to 
be heard. 

Sergeant Taddy : JSTot on my account. I am fully ca- 
pable of answering for myself. 

Mr. Justice Park: Has he not a right to possess the 
court on any subject he pleases? 

Sergeant Taddy: Not while I am in possession of it, 
and am examining a witness. 

Here the dispute ended, and his lordship threw him- 
self back in his chair and was silent. 



112 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Judge : " Will you tell us how this quarrel originated ? " 
Witness: "The prisoner made use of the following ex- 
pression, my lord : ' You are an idiot ! ' " 

Judge: (Observing great hilarity among the audience, 
to witness.) "Address your observations — to the jury." 

In arguing a point before a judge of the Superior Court, 
Col. Folk, of the Mountain Circuit, in North Carolina, 
laid down a very doubtful proposition of law. The judge, 
looking at him for a moment, said: 

"Col. Folk, do you think that is law?" 

" Candor compels me to say that I do not, but I did not 
know how it wouid strike your honor." 

The judge gravely said: 

"That may not be contempt of court, but it is a close 
shave." 

Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, a famous advocate 
in his time, was defending a prisoner in a murder case, 
and, becoming excited at the rejection of testimony of- 
fered, said sharply to the court: 

" Our Savior was convicted upon just such rulings." 

" Mr. Clerk," said the judge, " enter a fine of ten dol- 
lars against Mr. Marshall." 

" Well, this is the first time I ever heard of anybody 
being fined for abusing Pontius Pilate," was the quick 
response of Marshall. 

The judge, very indignant, ordered another fine of ten 
dollars. 

Marshall, with that peculiar, mirth-provoking smile 
that no one could imitate, arose, and with as much gravity 
as the circumstances permitted, addressed the court as 
follows : 

" As a good citizen, I feel bound to obey the order of 
this court; but as I don't happen to have twenty dollars 



BENCH AND BAR 113 

about me, I shall be compelled to borrow it from some 
friend ; and seeing no one present whose confidence and 
friendship I have so long enjoyed as your honor's, I make 
no hesitation in asking the small favor of a loan for a 
few days, to square the fines you have entered against 
me." 

This was a stumper. The judge, looking at Marshall 
and then at the clerk, said : 

"Mr. Clerk, remit Mr. Marshall's fines: the State is 
better able to lose twenty dollars than I am." 

In a trial before a justice of the peace, having exhausted 
his fund of argument and eloquence to no effect, Marsh- 
all, disgusted at the decision, said : 

" Will your honor fine me ten dollars for contempt of 
court?" 

" For what ? " asked the astonished magistrate. " Yoa 
have committed no contempt of court." 

" I assure you I have an infernal contempt for it." 

When Gen. Barnes first commenced practicing law m 
San Francisco — he was plain Mr. Barnes then — he was 
engaged in defending a suit involving a large amount of 
property. He had an uphill contest ; for the law, the evi- 
dence and the judge were against him. He was making 
an aggressive fight, however, and for several days was- 
compelled to submit to the taunts of the opposing coun- 
sel, the lying of witnesses and the rebukes of the judge. 
He grew tired of it, and so did his client. On the last 
day of the trial he decided to brook sach treatment no 
longer, and fortified himself with a pocketful of his client's 
gold. The attorney for the plaintiff asked an interested 
witness a palpably unfair question, and Barnes objected. 
As he expected the opposing counsel turned a torrent of 
abuse upon him and the court administered a stinging re- 
8 



114 WIT AND HUMOR. 

proof. The General rose, and with a blaze of eloquence 
denounced both judge and attorney as scoundrels and the 
witnesses as perjurers. The judge was taken so com- 
pletely by surprise that the General finished before he 
-could collect his scattered faculties. 

"Mr. Barnes, I adjudge you guilty of contempt of 
court," he roared, when he finally found his voice, " and 
you will pay a fine of $250." 

" That is about the price I thought this court would 
place upon its dignity and integrity, so I came prepared," 
coolly remarked the General as he counted out the gold. 

Years ago, in the city of Buffalo, a member of the bar, 
arguing a case at the General Term of the Supreme Court 
at which three of the judges were sitting, was greatly 
irritated by the frequent expression of dissent by the 
court to his propositions of law. Pausing abruptly in 
his argument, he exclaimed, with marked emphasis: 

" I will, perhaps, be excusable in remarking that this 
court strongly reminds me of a Demerara team." 

" What kind of a team is that ? " asked one of the judges. 

-"It is composed of two mules and a jackass." 

•"Fifty dollars fine for contempt of court," said the 
justice. And the fine was paid. 

A pert young Scotch advocate whose case had gone 
against him had the temerity to exclaim that " he Avas 
much astonished at such a decision ; " whereupon the court 
was about to commit him to jail, when John Scott, after- 
ward Lord Elclon, the counsel on the other side, interposed 
in his favor: 

" My lords, my learned friend is young ; if he had known 
your lordships as I have, he would not have expressed as- 
tonishment at any decision of your lordships " — an apol- 
ogy which seemed to satisfy the court. 



BENCH AND BAR. 115 

Not long after his first brief, a circumstance occurred 
which elicited the first scintillation of Curran's genius, 
and rendered him a terror alike to the bench and the bar. 

Lord Robertson, one of the presiding judges, was very 
unpopular. He had undertaken to edit an edition of 
Blackstone, but, being afraid of the critics, he simply gave 
it the title of " Blackstone's Commentaries, by a Member 
of the Irish Bar." Soon after the work appeared Curran 
was pleading a case before his lordship, when the judge 
interrupted him, and said: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, the learned counsel has mis- 
taken the law of this case. The law is so and so." 

To which Curran tartly replied : 

" If his lordship says so, the etiquette of the court de- 
mands that I submit, though neither the statute nor com- 
mon law of the country should sanction his lordship's 
opinion; but it is my duty and privilege to inform you, 
gentlemen of the jury, that I have never seen the law so 
interpreted in any book of my library." 

Eobertson sneeringly replied : " Perhaps your library 
is rather small, Mr. Curran." 

" I admit my library is small ; but I have always found 
it more profitable to read good books than to publish bad 
ones — books which their very authors and editors are 
ashamed to own." 

" Sir," said the judge, " you are forgetting the dignity 
of the judicial character." 

To this Curran promptly replied: 

" Speaking of dignity, your lordship reminds me of a 
book I have read — I refer to 'Tristram Shandy' — in 
which, if your lordship has read it, you will remember 
that the Irish Buffer Roche, on engaging in a squabble, 
lent his coat to a by-stander, and after the fight was ended 
he discovered that he had got a good beating and lost his 



116 WIT AND HUMOR. 

coat into the bargain, — your lordship can apply the illus- 
tration." 

" Sir," said the judge, very petulantly, " If you say an- 
other word I'll commit you." 

" If you do, my lord, both you and I shall have the 
pleasure of reflecting that I am not the worst thing your 
lordship has committed" 

Thad. Stevens, once having lost a cause in a county 
court through the stupid ruling of the court, left the 
room, scattering imprecations right and left. The judge 
straightened himself to his full height, assumed an air of 
offended majesty, and asked Thad. if he meant to " ex- 
press his contempt for this court." 

" Express rny contempt for this court ! No, sir, I am 
trying to conceal it." 

The common meaning of " over the left " appears in 
the records of the Hartford County Courts, Colony of 
Connecticut: 

"At a County Court Held at Hartford. 

" September 4, 1705. 

" Whereas James Steel did commence an action against 
Bevell Waters (both of Hartford) in this Court, upon hear- 
ing and tryall whereof the Court gave judgment against 
the said Waters, (as in justice they think they ought,) upon 
the declaring the said judgment, the said Waters did re- 
view to the Court in March next, that, being granted and 
entered, the said Waters, as he departed from the table, 
he said, ' God bless you over the left shoulder? 

" The Court order a record to be made thereof forth- 
with. A true copie: Test. 

"Caleb Stanley, Clerk." 

At the next court, Waters was tried for contempt for 
saying the words recited, " so cursing the Court," and on 



BENCH AND BAR. 117 

verdict fined five pounds. He asked a review of the Court 
following, which was granted; and pending trial, the 
Court asked counsel of the Rev. Messrs. Woodbridge and 
Buckingham, the ministers of the Hartford churches, as 
to the " common acceptation " of the offensive phrase. 
Their reply constitutes a part of the Record, and is as 
follows: — . 

" We are of opinion that those words, said on the other 
side to be spoken by Bevell Waters, include (1) prophane- 
ness, by using the name of God, that is holy, with such 
ill words whereto it was joyned; (2) that they carry 
great contempt in them, arising to the degree of an im- 
precation or curse, the words of a curse being the most 
contemptible that can ordinarily be used. 

"T. WOODBRIDGE. 

"T. Buckingham. 
"March 7th, 1705-6." 
The former judgment was affirmed on review. 

The la^e Judge Clairborne, of Northern Louisiana, is 
said to have swayed his sceptre with a potency rivaling 
that of a Kussian czar. On one occasion a prisoner was 
fined $50 and committed to jail for contempt of court in 
refusing to bow to him while passing along a public high- 
way. An application having been made to remit the fine 
and release the prisoner, on the ground that there was no 
contempt of court, as the judge, when on a public high- 
way, was not a court, and therefore not an object of con- 
tempt, the legal potentate straightened himself up in his 
seat, and, with the air of a lord chancellor, replied: 

" Sir, I'll have you know that 1 am judge of this parish; 
judge all the time; judge from the rising of the sun to the 
going down thereof; and always an object of contempt ." 

Attorney McLean, of Greensboro, North Carolina, while 
arguing a case before Judge Tourgee, lost his temper at 



118 WIT AND HUMOR. 

a ruling of the court, and used some petulant expression. 
Instantly the judge said: 

" Mr. McLean, the court does not understand you. Do 
you mean to express contempt for the court ? " 

Recovering his temper, McLean said, with the greatest 
good humor: 

" I hope your honor will not press that question." 

" I hear that Judge Blucketts is studying mind read- 
ing," said the lean lawyer. 

" If he gets proficient," said the fat lawyer, " he'll ar- 
rest the whole town for contempt of court." 

Corwin, Thomas.— "Cor win's intellectual faculty," 
says Mr. Spofford, "was keen, and his sense of humor, 
which made him a master of the art of ridicule, was de- 
lightfully spontaneous. He had a mobility of feature that 
was marvelous. No other man in public life could so 
surely throw an audience into roars of laughter by witty 
appeal or anecdote set off by an irresistibly comic facial 
expression. But great as was his power of humor, it was 
always subordinate, in his speeches, to the aim of con- 
vincing his audiences. I have heard him, when defend- 
ing a poor newspaper reporter in Cincinnati charged 
before a United States court with aiding in the escape of 
a fugitive slave, after convulsing the court with merri- 
ment at his picture of the ' majesty of the United States 
in hot pursuit of an unhappy negro making toward Can- 
ada as fast as his feet would carry him, turn the fun into 
solemn silence by apt allusions drawn from the Golden 
Rule and the Sermon on the Mount." 

Although earnest as a lawyer, speaker and statesman, 
keeping his audience in a roar, and often disturbing the 
gravity of the United States Senate, Corwin regarded his 
life a failure, because of his want of success in more seri- 



BENCH AND BAR. H# 

ous veins. Referring to a speech he had made the even- 
ing before, he said to a friend : 

" It was very good, but in bad style. Never make the 
people laugh. It is easy and captivating, but death in 
the long run to the speaker." 

" Why, Mr. Corwin, you are the last man living I ex- 
pected such an opinion from." 

"Certainly; because you have not lived as long as I 
have. Do you know, my young friend, that the world 
has a contempt for the man who entertains it ? One must 
be solemn — solemn as an ass — never say anything that 
is not uttered with the greatest gravity, to win respect. 
The world looks up to the teacher and down upon the 
clown. Yet, in nine cases out of ten, the clown is the 
better fellow of the two." 

" We who laugh may be well content if we are as suc- 
cessful as you have been." 

" You think so, and yet, were you to consult an old fel- 
low called Thomas Corwin, he would tell you that he con- 
sidered himself the worst used man in existence; that he 
has been slighted, abused, and neglected — and all for a 
set of fellows who look wise and say nothing." 

Someone asked Corwin if he had heard a certain story 
of Lewis D. Campbell's. 

" Was it about himself ? " inquired Corwin. 

" No, I believe not." 

" Well, then I never heard it." 

Coudert, Frederick R.— " Success at the Bar," by 
Frederick R. Coudert, the eminent New York jurist, is a 
brilliant in a beautiful setting : 

" Fortunately for the numberless candidates to forensic 
honors, no special gift is needed for the attainment of 
reasonable success at the bar. It is true that a certain 



120 WIT AND HUMOR. 

minimum of intelligence is required even for this, and it 
would, no doubt, be held actionable to-day, as it was some 
centuries ago, to charge a lawyer with being a fool, espe- 
cially with an expletive prefix that adds intensity to the 
slur. The reason given being as true to-day as it was 
then, that however unnecessary it might be for a parson 
(a point which was not directly ruled upon), it certainly 
was necessary for an attorney to be endowed with some 
intellectual capital. 

" Herein the lawyer is more fortunate than the poet. 
Horace, no mean judge himself, insists that neither men 
nor gods nor book-sellers will tolerate mediocrity in poets, 
but he generously distinguishes in the lawyer's favor. 

In certain things a medium is endur'd 
Who tries Messala's eloquence in vain, 
Nor can a knotty point of law explain 
Like learn'd Cascellius, yet may justly claim, 
For pleading or advice, some right to fame; 
But God and man, and letter'd poet denies 
That poets ever are of middling size. 

" For Messala and Cascellius read Carter or Choate or 
Parsons, and the lines are as true as when they were 
written. 

" Of course, the youthful and ambitious aspirant feels 
quite confident that he will be a Cascellius or a Messala, 
which is all the better ; he will not strike high if he aims 
low. But he will admit that the moral applies to the 
other young men who are to be his contemporaries if not 
his rivals. 

" It is a common and vulgar error to suppose that there 
are special rules of action for the attainment of success 
at the bar — a special drill, as it were, that fits the stu- 
dent for his chosen calling. If there be any such, they 
have escaped my observation. Whatever the dignity of 
the profession, it does not stand in this respect upon a 



BENCH AND BAR 121 

•different plane from other pursuits. The rules of morals, 
of arithmetic, of common sense, of expediency, are the 
same for the lawyer as for the less fortunate and distin- 
guished members of the human family. He cannot add 
to or detract from the ten commandments nor from the 
revised statutes because of his exalted calling. Diligence, 
sobriety, self-denial, character, .must enter into his stock 
in trade, or he will be a bankrupt, provided he has assets 
to justify the designation. He must be patient and long- 
suffering; he must learn to see others who are, he is quite 
sure, his inferiors, rise rapidly to honor and preferment, 
while he waits, chafing in obscure neglect. All of us 
cannot have a bank president in the ascending line of 
our genealogical tree; kindly uncles, like those in the 
English plays, are not often on hand to pat the nephew 
on the back, to call him a sad dog and give him a huge 
leather pocket-book filled with Bank of England notes. 
In other words, only the very few have the paths cleared 
for them by kindly gentlemen who have a decent regard 
for the ties of blood. Most of us must do the clearing 
away for ourselves, and, if we are what we ought to be, 
may rejoice all the more in the triumph that is our own; 
though the venerable relative who sends the early re- 
tainer and makes the payment of rent merely a perfunc- 
tory and easy operation should not be mentioned lightly, 
even by those who know him only through report. 

" If there is one quality which more than any other 
commands respect and deserves success, it is the faculty 
of self-denial, a real and genuine capacity to stifle incli- 
nation in small as well as great things, especially in 
small ones. Eo other ingredient enters so largely into 
success as this capacity to turn one's back deliberately on 
the pleasant things of life and to take up, bravely and 
cheerfully, its disagreeable duties. The upward steps 



122 "Wit and humor. 

are rough-hewn and hard to the feet. The siren's lay is 
as sweet to-da} 7 " as when wise Ulysses stuffed the ears of 
his companions so that her music would not draw them 
from honor and duty and turn them into swine. Nature 
abhors and frowns upon effort; she smooths the path of 
the sluggard, the self-indulgent, the vain and the foolish 
with her sweet melodies. It is easier to sleep than to 
watch, to glide with the easy current than to breast the 
waves and fight the tempest. Success, like the kingdom 
of heaven, can only be taken by storm. Easy-going dis- 
ciples of Epicurus think that the game is not worth the 
candle, and that a result that costs so much is too expen- 
sive. They may be right, but they are not of those who 
desire to succeed in an arduous profession and who believe 
that the honor and greatness of the reward are worth a 
hundred fold more than they cost. 

" Perhaps this is the place to add that in the law as in 
other callings, honesty is the best policy. I have heard 
this frequently asserted, but I am not quite convinced 
that it is true. I have known sorry knaves in eve^ pro- 
fession or trade to achieve what they and many others 
might call success, and it was success if by that word is 
meant the diversion of considerable sums from the pock- 
ets of others into their own, without any violation of the 
penal code. But perhaps success means something more, 
and implies, of necessity, the coerced and deserved re- 
spect of good men. Be this as it may, that honesty will 
always be frail and open to suspicion which is fed by 
the belief that it pa} T s better than its opposite. If the 
younger men will look at the seniors who have achieved 
real success, they will not need to be told that these men 
were loyal and true, whether it was policy or not. 

" To sum up, then, it is honest work that achieves suc- 
cess; for work means self-denial, and self-denial means 



BENCH AND BAR. 123 

virility. It is the man who succeeds in the end. If he is 
a real man, he will succeed without set rules ; if he be not, 
then, being only the image of a man, he may deceive 
himself and his friends with the belief that fortune has 
been a stepmother and frowned on him from his birth. 
Why disturb him and them if they are thus made happy ? " 

Counsel, The Successful. — The career of a leader 
at the bar shines in the polished rhyme of The Successful 
Counsel, published in the Journal of Jurisprudence and 
Scottish Law Magazine : 

How rapidly he makes his way, 

This most successful legal limb! 
Through half the night and all the day 

The happy agents follow him. 
Then follow from his affluent lips 

The wisdom of the seraphim, 
And every buzzy body sips 

The honey that's distilled by him. 
He's witty, too. You jest: thereat 

You see their Lordships looking piim 
Your favorite joke that fell so flat 

Is exquisite when said by him. 
"We gaze on wheresoe'er he goes, 

His figure, be it squat or slim; 
And even to his boots and " close " 

The wondering juniors copy him. 
The briefless, pacing day by day 

The weary boards not " in the swim," 
With grief (but not with grammar) say, 

"We wish to goodness we were him!" 
He snubs, lie sneers, he jibes, he frowns, 

Then smiles illume his visage grim; 
• We bear his temper's ups and downs, 

And e'en the judges bow to him. 
" Tis only pretty Fanny's way," 

And "geniuses must have their whim;" 
Whate'er he says or doesn't say, 

The happy agents follow him. 



124: WIT AND HUMOR. 

Retainers of both kinds he hath: 

His Pistol, Bardolph, Peto, Nym, 
Enjoy his smiles, endure his wrath, 

And serve as useful foils to him. 
Law only charms this legal swell: 

A primrose by the river's brim 
(See Wordsworth, case of Peter Bell) 

A primrose only is to him. 
You talk about historic times — 

The strife of Strafford, Hampden, Pym;- 
Of art, — the last new poet's rhymes: — 

A vacant stare's vouchsafed by him. 
Of politics he knows but this, 

Tt does not pay to turn and trim; 
Nor cares for them, yet must not miss 

What prize may be in store for him, 
Time passes; he becomes a judge: 

Sudden his luster groweth dim. 
His wisdom now you call it fudge, 

And nobody cares a rap for him. 
Ah! every dog must have his day. 

He's no more now than Jack or Jim; 
And all the happier agents say, 

" Sir Newman quite eclipses him." 
He sees his sun of glory set 

'Neath the horizon's purple rim; 
And thinks of days, with grim regret, 

When crowds of clients followed him. 

Court, United States Supreme. — One of the most 
amusing incidents that ever brightened the solemnity of 
the Supreme Court chamber occurred when Justice Miller 
undertook to arrest the flow of eloquence of an attorney 
who was arguing his first case, an appeal from the Cir- 
cuit Court of a Western state. The young lawyer was 
declaiming at the rate of one hundred and fifty words 
a minute on some of the simplest principles of law, 
which every attorney should fully understand before 
he gets his diploma, and, becoming weary after a while, 



BENCH AND BAR 125 

Miller interrupted the speaker in a sarcastic tone, in- 
quiring : 

" I hope the learned counsel will give the court the 
credit of knowing the rudiments of law." 

" I beg the pardon of your honor," replied the attorney 
in the blandest manner, " but I made that mistake in the 
lower court." 

A similar incident occurred more recently, when a 
young attorney from the South became entangled in com- 
plications of his own creating and was floundering along 
in a hopeless attempt to extricate himself. Judge Brewer, 
who is very kind-hearted and always helps a fellow-mor- 
tal out of a difficulty when he is able to do so, undertook 
to play the part of a good Samaritan and brought upon 
himself a shaft that his associates on the bench will never 
allow him to forget. Thinking that he might relieve the 
embarrassment of the counsel and give him a chance to 
make a fresh start, Brewer interrupted him and said: 

" I don't quite follow the learned counsel in his argu- 
ment. Perhaps if he will go back and repeat a little of 
what he has already said, I may understand him better. 
I haven't been able to follow the thread of his argument." 

"I noticed you couldn't," retorted the unabashed at- 
torney. " It is a very complicated point of law, but if 
you will give me your close attention I will try to make 
it so clear that you can understand it." 

Judge Brewer's remarks on " Misfits " in the legal pro- 
fession are worth noting: "I admit that lawyers do not 
support themselves by planting potatoes or plowing corn, 
though there is many an attorney who would bless him- 
self and bless the bar and bless all of us if he struck his 
name off the court rolls and entered it on the books of an 
agricultural society." 



126 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Justice Harlan's manner is courteous and refined ; but 
this does not prevent his administering severe rebuke 
when occasion demands. 

The Justice delivers two lectures weekly at Columbia 
University. One afternoon a late arrival among the stu- 
dents brought with him an extra edition of an evening 
paper, which, on taking his seat, he eagerly scanned for 
Cuban war news. Justice Harlan did not choose to tol- 
erate such inattention, so, after pausing a moment or two 
in his remarks, he said in cold tones: 

"I hope I do not disturb the young gentleman who is 
reading his paper." 

The student instantly put his paper out of sight, and 
for the remainder of his lecture Justice Harlan had no 
more attentive listener. 

In a golf match between Justice Harlan and Kev. Dr. 
Sterret, the Doctor discovered that his ball teed up in 
tempting style for a fine brassie shot, and, with the ut- 
most deliberation, he went through with the preliminary 
" waggles," and with a supreme effort — missed the ball. 
For fully a minute he gazed at the tantalizing sphere 
without uttering a word. At length Harlan remarked 
solemnly: "Doctor, that was the most profane silence I 
ever listened to." 

Judge Strong, after ten years of service, resigned in 
1880 in the zenith of his physical and mental powers. To 
a friend he thus expressed the reason for his resignation: 
" I would rather go when everybody would be glad to 
have me stay than stay until everybody would be glad to 
have me go." 

Justice Hunt was a gentleman of culture and refine- 
ment. After Hunt's appointment, some one asked Judge 
Black, of Pennsylvania, what he thought of the new 



BENCH AND BAR. 127 

justice. The old judge, changing his quid of tobacco 
from one cheek to the other, smiled significantly and re- 
marked: "He is a very lady-like personage." 

The late Justice Davis said to a young lawyer: "You 
need not be afraid to speak before the Supreme Court 
judges. If one of them interrupts you in the midst of 
an argument by some irrelevant question, don't get fright- 
ened and spoil your argument by stopping and answering 
him. Just say, quietly : i Excuse me, your honor, but I'll 
reach that by and by ; ' and if you don't reach it, it won't 
matter. You need not be afraid that you will be called 
on to answer it after you have taken your seat." 

Chief Justice Fuller, himself a Chicagoan by adoption, 
is credited with having said exultingly that Chicago, the 
great Cosmopolis, " has within its limits more Poles than 
any city in Poland, more Bohemians than any city in Bo- 
hemia, more Germans than any city in Germany save Ber- 
lin, more Irish than any city in Ireland save Dublin, more 
Italians than any city in Italy save Naples and Kome." 
Associate Justice Brewer ventured to add as a suitable 
climax: " And doubtless more saints and sinners than any 
place in the universe, save heaven and hades." The Chief 
Justice promptly admitted the charge as to the saints, but 
evidently thought that New York might be a successful 
rival in the matter of sinners. 

Cox, Sergeant.— Sergeant Cox, editor of Cox's 
Criminal Cases, was a remarkable man in many respects. 
Though enormously rich, he was content for many years 
to play the part of journeyman judge at the Middlesex 
Sessions for the somewhat modest remuneration of five 
guineas for every day that he was called upon to sit, the 
annual sum yielded by the office being only a little over 
JE500. He was a large holder of newspaper property, 



128 WIT AND HUMOR. 

being the owner of The Field, The Queen, The Law 
Times, The Exchange and Mart, and several other peri- 
odicals. To merely mention the two first-named publi- 
cations would be, of course, to convey the idea of very 
considerable income. He was a dapper-looking little man, 
with a florid complexion and a perpetual smile. He took 
a long time to try his cases, and was a painstaking and 
most humane judge. He was a member of the Western 
Circuit, and there is a rather good story concerning him, 
dating from the time when he practiced at the bar: 

It had happened one day at Exeter that there was a 
great stress upon the time of the judges — both the calen- 
dar and cause lists being unusually heavy, — and, in con- 
sequence, it was resolved to obtain assistance from the 
bar. Cox wore a silk gown, and was selected to try the 
overflow of cases. He took his seat with evident pleasure, 
and with a certain amount of exaggerated dignity. When 
a commissioner is appointed temporarily in this way, it is 
customary for counsel to address him by the title of " my 
lord," and in other respects to treat him exactly as though 
he were a permanent judge. It so happened that the first 
case tried by Cox was one in which a barrister named 
Carter appeared for the defence ; and the latter gentleman 
" my lorded " the former to his heart's content. Pres- 
ently a point of law arose, and Carter, addressing the 
presiding dignitary, said : 

" My lord, if your lordship remembers, there is tne well- 
known case, my lord, of and . If your lordship 

will permit me, I will read you the marginal note." 

Cox observed : 

" Mr. Carter, I don't see that this case is on all-fours 
with the present. In fact, I don't think it has anything 
to do with it." 

"What!" said Carter, dropping "my lord;" "do you 



BENCH AND BAK. 129 

mean, sir, to say that you don't see the force of my argu- 
ment ? The best thing, sir, you can do is to go and con- 
sult the judge in the adjoining court." 

The Sergeant replied: 

" I shall do nothing of the sort. Pray proceed with 
your case." 

Cross-examination. — In his Golden Bules, David 
Paul Brown suggests the following for cross-examination 
of witnesses: 

" Be mild with the mild, shrewd with the crafty, con- 
fiding with the honest, merciful to the young, the frail 
or the fearful, rough to the ruffian, and a thunderbolt to 
the liar. But in all this, never be unmindful of your own 
dignity. Bring to bear all the powers of your mind, not 
that you may shine, but that virtue may triumph and 
your cause prosper." 

" If the witness determine to be witty or refractory with 

you, you had better settle that account with him at first 

or its items will increase with the examination. Let him 

have an opportunity of satisfying himself either he has 

mistaken your power or his own ; but in any event be 

careful that }^ou do not lose your temper ; anger is always 

either the precursor or evidence of assured defeat in any 

intellectual conflict." 
i 
Julian Ralph, in his recollections of William Fullerton r 

says: He was an undoubted master of the fine, art of 
cross-examination. We who know what brains have done 
would never rank a mere mouth and a big pair of lungs 
above an intellect. Think how Fullerton used to handle 
a witness! Bern ember how each witness on the other 
side used to take the chair frowning and sullen and seem- 
ing to say : " I have been told about you. You can't get 



130 WIT AND HUMOR. 

me to let you play with me. I'll tell you nothing that 
you'll like." But then recollect how Fullerton took that 
witness in hand and told him how unjustly he (the law- 
yer) had been credited with a desire to discomfort peo- 
ple, and how he was certain he and the witness were 
going to become great friends. How smoothly, how 
adroitly, how daintily he led the witness on and on, we 
reporters wondering what to take down and what to leave 
out, for no one could say what the climax was to be or 
how or when it would come. 

The lawyer and witness fell to chatting and the wit- 
ness was lulled out of all sense of danger until, suddenly, 
like a thunder-clap, the witness had said the thing the 
lawyer wanted, had supplied a little pin that fastened to- 
gether a dozen links in a chain which left the witness 
fettered and bound to the truth which he had never 
meant to tell. That was a great cross-examiner, and no 
mistake. He never angered judges and juries or placed 
himself so that it was a damage to a case to have him 
open his mouth. 

A successful cross-examination is one of the most diffi- 
cult and important duties which an attorney can per- 
form. It requires a knowledge of human nature — of 
the springs of human action — a subtle and nice discrim- 
ination. " When it is not founded on materials of con- 
tradiction, or directed to obtain some information which 
the witness will be willing to give, it proceeds on the 
assumption that the party interrogated has sworn an un- 
truth, which he may be induced to vary." But it is often 
the means by which trustworthy evidence is mischiev- 
ously weakened or set entirely aside. A fine illustration 
of this occurred in Kenyou's cross-examination of a wit- 
ness in the trial of Lord George Gordon. The witness 



BENCH AND BAR 131 

testified that a certain flag was carried in a procession. 
Kenyon cross-examined him as follows : 

" Can you describe the dress of this man you saw carry- 
ing a flag?" 

" I cannot charge my memory; it was a dress not worth 
minding — a very common dress." 

"Had he his own hair or a wig? " 

"If I recollect right, he had black hair; shortish hair, 
1 think." 

"Was there anything remarkable about his hair?" 

" No ; I do not remember anything remarkable ; he was 
a coarse-looking man; he appeared to me like a brewer's 
servant in his best clothes." 

"How do you know a brewer's servant in his best 
clothes from an} r other man?" 

" It is out of my power to describe him better than I 
do. He appeared to me to be such." 

" I ask you by what means you distinguish a brewer's 
servant from any other man's? " 

" There is something in a brewer's servant different 
from other men." 

" Well, then, you can tell us how you distinguish a 
brewer's servant from any other trade?" 

" I think a brewer's servant's breeches, clothes and 
stockings have something very distinguishing." 

" Tell me what in his breeches and the cut of his coat 
and stockings it was by which you distinguished him ? " 

" I cannot swear to any particular mark." 

This witness undoubtedly told the truth, yet it is re- 
lated that he was hooted from the witness box as if he had 
sought to impose on the jury. Erskine, who was engaged 
with Kenyon in the case, in his address to the jury adroitly 
took advantage of the temporary prejudice: 

" You see," said he, " gentlemen of the jury, by what 
strange means villainy is detected." 



132 WIT AND HUMOR 

Kenyon had been at the bar but a short time when that 
trial took place ; and this cross-examination alone estab- 
lished his reputation as an able advocate. 

Sir James Scarlett (Lord Abinger) was a severe cross- 
examiner. An example of his offensive and overbearing 
treatment of witnesses is afforded in his cross-examination 
of Grimaldi, the famous clown, as given in Dickens' Life 
of Grimaldi: 

Scarlett commenced his examination by saying, "Dear 
me ! Pray, sir, are you the great Mr. Grimaldi, formerly 
of Covent Garden Theatre ? " 

The witness reddened and replied: 

" I used to be a pantomime actor, sir ? " 

" Pray, don't blush, Mr. Grimaldi, there is not the least 
occasion for it," said Sir James. 

" This, of course, made Grimaldi blush more and more, 
although he replied: 

1,1 I'm not blushing, sir." 

The spectators tittered, and Sir James, smiling blandly, 



" I assure you, Mr. Grimaldi, that you are blushing vio- 
lently." 

Grimaldi was angry and nervous, but he had his wits 
about him, and replied : 

" I beg your pardon, sir, but you are really quite mis- 
taken. The flush which you observe on my face is a 
Scarlett one, I admit, but I assure you that it is nothing 
more than a reflection from your own." 

The people shouted with laughter, and Sir James ban- 
tered the witness no more. 

Mr. Alexander, architect, was once under cross-examina- 
tion by Sergeant Garrow. After asking him his name, 
the sergeant proceeded : 

" You are a builder, I believe ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 133 

"No, sir, I am not a builder; I am an architect." 

"Ah, well, architect or builder, builder or architect, 
they are much the same, I suppose ? " 

"I beg your pardon, sir, I cannot admit that; I con- 
sider them totally different." 

" Oh, indeed ! perhaps you will state wherein this great 
difference consists." 

" An architect, sir, prepares the plans, conceives the de- 
sign, draws out the specifications — in short, supplies the 
mind; the builder is merely the bricklayer or the car- 
penter; the builder is in fact the machine; the architect 
the power that puts the machine together, and sets it 
going." 

" Oh, very well, Mr. Architect, that will do; and now, 
after your very ingenious distinction without a difference, 
perhaps you can inform the court who was the architect 
of the Tower of Babel?" 

The reply, for promptness and wit, is perhaps not to 
be rivaled in the whole history of rejoinder: 

"There was no architect, sir, — and hence the confu- 
sion." 

Edward Manson's "Cross-examination — a Socratic 
Fragment," in the Law Quarterly Eeview, is nicely drawn. 

Socrates: Shall we not be right in saying then that the 
object of cross-examining witnesses is to elicit the truth ? 

Philotimus: It would seem so, Socrates. 

Soc. : Then the good advocate, aiming at this mark, 
will ask only such questions as will help to discover the 
truth ? 

Phil. : Only such questions, Socrates. 

Soc: How shall we reconcile this with what we ar- 
rived at before, that it is the function of the judge to find 
out the truth, and not the function of the advocate? 

Phil. : This is a hard nut to crack, Socrates. 



134 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Soc. : Have we not then been confusing two different 
kinds of excellence, that of the judge and that of the ad- 
vocate, just as if we were to confuse the excellence of the 
terrier and the excellence of the rat ? 

Phil. : We seem to have been guilty of some such mis- 
take, Socrates. 

Soc: Let us consider then what is the special excel- 
lence of the advocate. Will it not be to recommend him- 
self to his client so that he may obtain more briefs, and 
become popular among litigious people? 

Phil. : This seems very probable, Socrates. 

Soc: Then will not the advocate who proposes this 
end to himself try, if he has a bad case, to make the worse 
appear the better reason, and to hoodwink the jury, and 
to browbeat and bully the witnesses and do other things 
of this kind, if he sees that they please his employer and 
procure him special retainers ? 

Phil. : This is likely enough, Socrates. 

Soc. : And if he sees a witness timid and nervous he 
will speak to him in a loud voice and try to frighten 
him, and will treat him roughly as if he was speaking 
lies? 

Phil. : We shall not be far wrong, Socrates, in expect- 
ing this. 

Soc: And if he knows anything to the disadvantage 
of the witness he will rake it up, will he not, however 
old it may be, and whether it has anything to do with 
the matter in question or not; as if a witness is called to 
prove a will, he will ask him whether he did not once 
steal apples when he was a boy, and if he knows nothing, 
he will suggest things which are not true and make in- 
nuendoes and insinuations ? 

Phil. : This seems the best course, Socrates. 

Soc. : And if the jud.o-e interferes or remonstrates, he 



BENCH AND BAR. 135 

will insult him as far as tie dares, or make slighting re- 
marks in an undertone, to make his employer think that 
he is master in the court and more knowing than the 
judge? 

Phil. : I should advise him to act so, if he would listen 
to me. 

Soc. : And thus he will get the reputation of a verdict- 
winner, and will be talked about in the newspapers, will 
he not, and will receive retainers and refreshers contin- 
ually? 

Phil. : No doubt, Socrates. 

Soc. While the unskilful advocate, who asks only rele- 
vant questions and is courteous to witnesses and respect- 
ful to the judge, will be neglected, and his fee-book will 
suffer ? 

Phil.: Assuredly, Socrates. 

Soc. : We seem to have arrived at this, then, that law 
is in the nature of a cock-fight, and that the litigant who 
wishes to succeed must try and get an advocate who is a 
game bird with the best pluck and the sharpest spurs ? 

Phil. : It would be madness not to do so, Socrates. 

Soc: And to know the law and the true principles of 
justice will be a matter of secondary importance? 

Phil. : Altogether secondary. 

Soc. : So that we may say that the law is a matter of 
clever rhetoric, and of bullying witnesses and cajoling 
juries, and other such arts, may we not? 

Phil.: Apparently. 

Soc. : Then how shall we reconcile this with the say- 
ing of one of the greatest of the wise men, that "law 
ought to be the leading science in every well-ordered 
commonwealth ? " 

Phil. : We are in a fix, Socrates. 

Soc. : May we not have been wrong in saying that the 



136 WIT AND HUMOR. 

special excellence of the advocate is to advertise himseli 
and make himself popular with solicitors ? 

Phil. : I am inclined to think that we must hark back, 
Socrates. 

At the Donegal Assizes the following cross-examina- 
tion of a witness by Mr. Doherty occasioned much merri- 
ment: 

" What business do you follow? " 

" I am a schoolmaster." 

" Did you turn off your scholars, or did they turn you 
off?" 

" I do not wish to answer irrelevant questions." 

"Are you a great favorite with your pupils?" 

" Ay, troth am I, a much greater favorite than you are 
with the public." 

" Where were you, sir, this night ? " 

"This night!" said the witness; "there is a learned 
man ! — this night is not yet come ; I suppose you mean 
that night " (here the witness looked at the judge, and 
winked his eye as if in triumph). 

" I presume the c schoolmaster was abroad ' that night, 
doing nothing ? " 

" Define ' nothing,' " said the witness. Doherty did not 
comply. "Well," said the learned schoolmaster, "I will 
define it — it is a footless stocking without a leg " (roars 
of laughter in which his lordship joined). 

"You may go dowu, sir." 

"Faith, I believe you're tired enough of me; but it is 
my profession to enlighten the public, and if you have 
any more questions to ask, I will answer them." 

In a trial before Chief Justice Shaw, at Pittsfield, Mass., 
a prominent cross-examiner asked a witness: 

" Where did you get the money with which you made 
the purchase spoken of ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 137 

The witness thundered: "None of your business!" 

Counsel appealed to the court: "Are counsel to be in- 
sulted in this manner?" 

"Witness," said the chief justice, compassionately, "do 
you wish to change your last answer?" 

"No, sir, I don't!" 

" Well, I wouldn't if I were in your place," said Shaw. 

Counsel practicing at the Old Bailey, London, are all 
eligible to plead in the courts of law at Westminster Hall. 
They seldom, however, appear in the latter place. When 
they do, they sometimes come in shoals. They are far 
less refined in their examinations and cross-examinations 
of witnesses than the counsel who practice in the courts 
of law. At a trial in the Court of Common Pleas the 
laugh was turned against an Old Bailey counsel who was 
doing his best to be at once severe and witty at the ex- 
pense of an adverse witness. The latter was one of the 
skin-and-bone class of persons, and, by a curious coinci- 
dence, so was the counsel. You could not look on either 
without coming to the conclusion that to partake of a 
substantial meal must be an era in their existence. 

" So, sir," says the counsel to the witness, in the regu- 
lar brow-beating style ; " so, sir, you have been in the 
prosecutor's house ? " 

Witness: I have. 

Counsel : Have you often ? 

Witness : Sometimes. (A laugh.) 

Counsel: That, sir, is not an answer to my question. I 
ask, have you been in this person's house often ? 

Witness (with much archness of manner) : I don't know 
what you mean by " often." 

Counsel : Have you been twenty times ? 

Witness: I never kept count how many times. (Laugh- 
ter.) 



138 WIT AND HUMOR 

Counsel: Come, sir, don't be rude. I ask you, have- 
you been twenty times in this man's house ? 

Witness : I can't speak positively as to the number of 
times. 

The Bench: About the number of times; speaking ac- 
cording to the bast of your belief ? 

Witness (with great readiness and politeness): I should 
think, my lord, I have been in the prosecutor's house 
from fifteen to twenty times. 

Counsel (with great harshness of manner): So, sir, 
though you could not answer the question when put by 
me, you found no difficulty in answering it when put by 
his lordship. 

Witness: His lordship put 

Counsel (interrupting witness): Stay a little, if you 
please, sir. 

Witness: O certainly; as long as you like; I'm in no 
particular hurry. (Loud laughter.) 

Counsel: Perhaps, sir, you would condescend to tell 
the court what your object was in going to the prosecu- 
tor's house? 

Witness: The court has not asked me the question. 
(Renewed laughter.) 

Counsel: Don't be insolent, sir; I have asked you the 
question. 

Witness : Then I can't answer you. 

Counsel: You must answer me, sir. 

Witness: I can't; for I often went without knowing 
the reason why. (Laughter.) 

Counsel: Can you inform us then about what particu- 
lar hour you were in the habit of visiting his house ? 

Witness (looking towards the bench) : Is it necessary 
that I should answer that question, my lord ? 

The Judge: If you can, I do not see why you should 
not. 



BENCH AND BAR. 13^ 

Counsel : Come, sir ; answer the question. 

Witness: 1 should suppose it generally was between 
one and two o'clock. 

Counsel (his countenance brightening up as if he had 
made some important discovery) : O, I see ; that was about 
the dinner hour, was it not ? 

"Witness : I never inquired what was the dinner hour. 

Counsel: Perhaps not; but I dare say your nose would 
be of some service in enabling you to ascertain it ? 

Witness: My nose, sir, never asks any questions. (Loud 
laughter.) 

Counsel (his face coloring with confusion) : But though 
your nose does not speak, I dare say it has acquired con- 
siderable dexterity, from experience, at discovering when 
a good dinner is on the table of a friend, and enabling 
you to regulate your visit accordingly. 

Witness: You must be judging of my nose from your 
own, sir. (Eoars of laughter, in which the Bench joined.) 

Counsel (laboring to conceal his mortification): You 
seem disposed to be very witty to-day, sir. 

Witness : I think we are, sir. 

This sarcastic though only implied allusion to the ef- 
forts of the counsel to be witty told with admirable effect. 

Counsel: You say that your favorite hour for visiting 
this man's house was between one and two o'clock. 

Witness: I never said anything of the kind. 

Counsel (pulling himself up) : What, sir, do you mean 
to deny what you have just said ? Kecollect, sir, you are 
on your oath. 

Witness: I said that was generally about the time^ 
but I never said anything about favorite hour. 

Counsel: Well, sir, perhaps you will have no objec- 
tion to tell us whether you were in the habit of partak- 
ing of the prosecutor's dinner, when honoring him with 
your visits at the particular time you mention. 



140 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Witness: I do not see what that has to do with the 
present case. 

Counsel : It's not what you see, sir. Pray, sir, answer 
me the question, whether you were in the habit of par- 
taking of this man's dinner on such occasions ? 

"Witness: Whether I partook of it or not depended 
on circumstances. 

Counsel: On what circumstances, sir? 

Witness: Why, on whether I was asked to partake of 
it or not. (Loud laughter.) 

Counsel: Yes, I dare say you never declined an in- 
vitation when you got one. 

Witness (with great emphasis): Never, sir. Never 
refuse a good dinner when I can get one. (Kenewed 
laughter.) 

Counsel: I can well believe that. And I'm sure you 
would do the dinner of any friend ample justice. 

Witness: I always do my best, sir, on such occasions. 
(Loud laughter.) 

Counsel: You look the very picture of a hungry fel- 
low. 

Witness: Yes, sir; both of us look like the picture of 
hungry fellows : we look as if we were kept on starva- 
tion allowance. 

The walls of the court resounded again with the shouts 
of laughter which followed this severe retort, the effect 
of which was greatly heightened by the peculiar arch- 
ness of manner in which it was made. The learned 
counsel was completely crest-fallen, and made no further 
efforts to be witty at the witness's expense. 

At a trial in the Court of King's Bench as to an alleged 
piracy of the " Old English Gentleman," one of the first 
witnesses put into the box was Cooke. 

" Now, sir," said Sir James Scarlett, in his cross-exam- 



BENCH AND BAR. 141 

ination, " you say that the two melodies are identical bull 
different. What am I to understand by that, sir?" 

" What I said was, that the notes in the two arrange- 
ments are the same, but with a different accent — the one 
being in common while the other is in triple time ; con- 
sequently the position of the accented notes is different 
in the two copies." 

"What is a musical accent?" Sir James flippantly in- 
quired. 

" My terms for teaching music are a guinea a lesson," 
said Cooke, much to the merriment of the court. 

" I do not want to know your terms for teaching," said 
the counsel, " I want you to explain to his lordship and 
the jury what is musical accent." Sir James waxed wroth. 
" Can you see it," he continued. 

"No," was the answer. 

"Can you feel it?" 

"Well, a musician can." 

After an appeal to the judge, the examining counsel 
again put the question: 

"Will you explain to his lordship and the jury — who 
are supposed to know nothing about music — the mean- 
ing of what you call accent ? " 

" Musical accent," rejoined Cooke, "is emphasis laid on 
a certain note just in the same manner as you would lay 
stress on any word when speaking, in order to make your- 
self better understood. I will give you an illustration, 
Sir James. If I were to say ' you are a donkey,' the ac- 
cent rests on donkey ; but if instead I said ' you are a 
donkey,' it rests on you, Sir James, and I have no doubt 
that the gentlemen of the jury will corroborate me in 
this." 

Lincoln's power as a jury lawyer was remarkable. In 
the Grayson murder case he appeared for the defense. 



142 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Two young men, unfriendly, were in love with a young 
girl. One of them, Lockwood, was murdered. The evi- 
dence against the prisoner was circumstantial, but strong. 
His conviction seemed a certainty. The witnesses for the 
commonwealth were allowed to go without cross-exam- 
ination, except the last one. Then Lincoln began: 

" You saw the shooting ? " 
. "Yes." 

"Saw the pistol?" 

"Yes." 

"Stood near by?' 

" Twenty feet away." 

" In the open field ? " 

" No, in the beech timber." 

" Leaves on the timber ? " 

" Yes." 

" At ten in the evening ? " 

" Yes." 

" You could see the pistol and how it hung ? " 

"Yes." 

" Near the meeting place ? " 

" Three quarters of a mile away." 

" Did Grayson or any one have a candle ? " 

"No." 

" How did you see it then in the night ? " 

" By moonlight." 

Lincoln went down into his side pocket, pulled out an 
almanac and said to the court: 

" If your honor, please, I call your attention to this page 
and this date, and ask you to note that at that hour, ten 
o'clock on the tenth of August, there was no moon — the 
moon rose at one o'clock the next morning ? " 

The effect of this evidence was dramatic. The prisoner 
was acquitted. The moonlight perjurer was the murderer. 



BENCH AND BAR. 143 

A story that Lincoln used to tell is a fine illustration 
of much testimony and little evidence, or, as the old saw 
puts it, " All cry and little wool." He appeared for a de- 
fendant in an assault and battery case. The prosecutor 
was not much hurt, and, in the course of the cross-exam- 
ination Lincoln asked him: 

" How much ground did you fight over ? " 

"About six acres." 

" Don't you think that that was an almighty small crop 
of fight for so much ground ? " 

When Mr. Huddleston was at the bar, he was gener- 
ally on one side or the other in important horse cases. 
It was said he not only knew a great deal about the 
quadruped in question, but even more about the bipeds 
who had to deal with it. He had a hard nut to crack in 
a Mr. Frederick Jacobs, who carried on a very lucrative 
business at Cheltenham as a horse dealer. 

Jacobs was, if not fond of law, not afraid of it, and 
more than once fought a touch-and-go case out, and got a 
verdict, too, although the leader of the circuit — Huddle- 
ston himself — was against him. The latter, therefore, 
began to look upon Jacobs as a foeman worthy of his 
steel, and having once got him as a plaintiff into the 
witness-box for cross-examination deliberately prepared 
to administer a chastisement. He began by saying in a 
sharp, harsh tone : 

" Now, Jacobs." 

Jacobs calmly retorted: 

"Well, Huddleston?" 

Hereupon an impressive pose was made by the aston- 
ished and indignant counsel, and the judge (Baron Mar- 
tin) sternly rebuked the witness. 

" Sir," he observed, " you must treat the learned coun- 
sel with more respect." 



144: WIT AND HUMOR 

" My lord," answered Jacobs, " I am sure you would 
not be so forgetful of etiquette as to call me ' Jacobs ' 
upon so brief an acquaintance." 

His lordship, amid much laughter, nodded his acquies- 
cence in this undoubted rule of etiquette, and intimated 
as much to Huddleston, who, not noticing that the wit- 
ness was respectfully addressing the judge, somewhat 
testily cried out : 

" Come, Mr. Jacobs," emphasizing the prefix. 

The witness, with the most perfect but irritating sang 
froid, turned around and remarked: 

" Wait a minute, Mr. Huddleston. At present I am 
addressing a gentleman. When he has done with me I 
will give you every attention." 

This hot rejoinder drew from all the young barristers 
present and from the public in court a roar of laughter; 
and even the grave seniors could not help expressing sat- 
isfaction at the spectacle of the biter bitten. Feeling 
that the laugh was against him, Huddleston changed 
his tactics, and smiling in return with a blandness which 
displayed his excellent teeth to great advantage, recom 
menced his attack: 

" Well, Mr. Jacobs, let me ask you, are you good at 
accounts, or do you employ a bookkeeper?" 

" My head is not good at accounts." 

" I thought not. Your head is much too good-looking 
to be good for much." 

" Well, Mr. Huddleston, in that particular attribute I 
certainly have the advantage of you." 

A lawyer, cross-examining a negro witness in one of 
the justice courts at Macon, Georgia, was getting along 
fairly well until he asked the witness what his occupa- 
tion was: 

" I'se a carpenter, sah." 



BENCH AND BAR. 145 

" What kind of a carpenter ? " 

" They calls me a jack-leg carpenter, sah." 

" What is a jack-leg carpenter ? " 

" He is a carpenter who is not a first-class carpenter, 
sah." 

"Well, explain fully what you understand a jack-leg 
carpenter to be." 

" Boss, I declar' I dunno how ter ' splain any mo' 
'xcept to say hit am jes de same diffunce twixt you an' 
er first-class lawyer." 

Jeffrey and Cockburn were once engaged in a case in 
Scotland. Jeffrey began by asking one of the witnesses, 
a plain, stupid-looking countryman, " Is the defendant, 
in your opinion, perfectly sane ? " The witness gazed in 
bewilderment at the question, but gave no answer. Jef- 
frey repeated it, altering the words, " Do you think the 
defendant capable of managing his own affairs ? " Still 
in vain. "I ask you," said Jeffrey, "do you consider 
the man perfectly rational ? " 

No answer yet ; the witness glowered with amazement 
and scratched his head. 

" Let me tackle him," said Cockburn. Then, assuming 
his own broadest Scotch tones, and turning to the ob- 
durate witness, he began, " Hae ye your mull (snuff-box) 
wi' ye ? " 

" Ou, ay," said the awkward fellow, stretching out his 
snuff-horn to Cockburn. 

" Noo, hoo long hae ye kent John Sampson ?" said the 
witty advocate, saluting the mull and taking a pinch. 

"Ever since he was that height," was the ready reply, 
the witness indicating with his hand the alleged height. 

" And dae ye think noo, atween you and me," said 
Cockburn, in his most insinuating Scottish brogue, " that 
therms ony thing in till the creature f " 
10 



146 WIT AND HUMOR 

" I would not lippen (trust) him with a bull calf," was 
the instant rejoinder. 

The end was gained amid the convulsions of the court. 
Jeffrey said to Cock burn that he had fairly extracted the 
essence from the witness. 

Counsel (cross-examining) : " How large did you say this 
pan was ? " 

Witness : "A four-quart pan, I should say." 

" What do you mean by a four-quart pan ? " 

"A pan that holds four quarts." 

" Wine or beer measure ? " 

"Wine, no; beer, I guess it's beer; I won't be certain." 

" But you think it's beer. What is the shape of a four- 
quart pan ? " 

"Bound." 

"Like a ball?" 

" No ; like a — like a barrel." 

" Bound like a barrel ? " 

"Yes." 

" Well, is a four-quart pan tall or short ? " 

"It doesn't make any difference." 

" If a pan was four inches across the bottom and twelve 
inches tall?" 

"It wouldn't be a pan at all; it would be a pail." 

" Then a pan can be a pail?" 

"Why, no." 

"But you just said so." 

" Was there a hole in this pan ? " 

"Yes, a little hole." 

" In the bottom or top ? " 

" Of course there wasn't any hole in the top." 

"Then how could anything be poured into the pan?" 

" Oh, I forgot; the top is all hole." 

"And the bottom ? " 



BENCH AND BAR 1-.-7 

" Is all pan." 

" That will do. You see, gentlemen of the jury, the 
witness has no idea of a four-quart pan at all." 

Henry Phillips, the vocalist, in his Recollections, gives 
an amusing episode in the trial of an English suit upon 
the copyright of the song : The Fine Old English Gentle- 
man. Tom Cooke (composer of Lovers Eitornella and 
musical director of Drury Lane Theater) was on the wit- 
ness stand, and on request of counsel played the song 
upon a violin. The judge then asked with surprise: 

"Is that all?" 

Tom: "It is, my lord." 

Judge: "Well, that appears to be very simple and 
easy." 

Tom (holding out the bow and violin) : " It is. Will 
your lordship try it? " (Roars of laughter.) 

Usher: "Si-lence!" 

Counsel: "Now, Mr. Cooke, is that which you have 
just played a melody ? " 

Tom: " Well, I really don't think it is. The first part 
is merely ascending the scale, and the few bars after- 
wards I don't think amount to a melody." 

Counsel : " That is evading the question. Do you know 
what a melody is ? " 

Tom : " I'm an Irishman, and I think I do." 

Counsel: " Well, define it." 

Tom : " Define what ? " (Both parties were now in a 
passion.) 

Counsel : " Define, sir, what is a melody." 

Tom: " It's impossible." 

Counsel: "Can you decline a verb, sir?" 

Tom: " I think I can." 

Counsel : " Do, then. 

Tom: "I'm an ass. He's an ass." (Pointing to the 



148 WIT AND HUMOR. 

barrister.) "You are an ass." (Boars of laughter in 
which the judge joined.) 

Counsel : " Let that witness stand down." 

In the rush of aspirants for places at Washington oc- 
curred the following examination by Judge C of a 

candidate for doorkeeper of the House — the candidate 
supposing the judge to be a member of Congress: 

"If you please, sir, I wish to be elected doorkeeper of 
the House, and if you will be so good as to vote for me 
I will try to — " 

" Take a seat, sir, and I will examine you." 

" Yes, sir, if you please." 

J udge (gravely) : " Have you ever been a doorkeeper ? " 

" No, sir ; but I trust by your vote and — " 

" Have you ever been instructed in the responsible and 
arduous duties of doorkeeping?" 

"No, sir; but I would like to be." 

" Have you ever attended lectures on doorkeeping ? " 

"Why, no; I never heard of any." 

Judge (sternly): "Have you ever read a book on the 
science of doorkeeping ? " 

" I never did, sir; but I would if — " 

" Have you ever conversed with one who has read such 
a book?" 

"No, sir; but I certainly will." 

Judge (solemnly): " Do you not see, sir, that you have 
not a single qualification for the office ? " 

Exit candidate. 

Curran, John P. — Curran was known at school as 
"stuttering Jack Curran," and dubbed by a debating 
society to which he belonged, " Orator Mum," in honor 
of his signal failure as a speaker. By long practice of 
speech and gesture he surmounted every difficulty. He 



BENCH AND BAR. 149 

turned his shrill, disagreeable voice into a flexible, sus- 
tained and finely-modulated one, and became one of the 
most brilliant and eloquent advocates that the world has 
ever produced. 

His sweet and tender pathos appears in the following 
quotation from one of his addresses. Lord Avonmore, 
an old college companion of his, was on the bench. They 
had been members of a certain joyous club. Curran, ex- 
pressing the hope that the decision of the court would be 
favorable, said: 

"This soothing hope I draw from the dearest and ten- 
derest recollections of my life; from the remembrance of 
those Attic nights which we have spent with those ad- 
mired, respected, beloved companions who have gone 
before us; over whose ashes the most precious tears of 
Ireland have been shed. (Here Lord A. could not refrain 
from tears.) Yes, my good lord, I see you do not forget 
them. I see their sacred forms passing in sad review be- 
fore your memory." 

His ruling passion was his joke ; and it was strong, if 
not in death, at least in his last illness. One morning his 
physician observed : 

" You seem to cough with more difficulty." 

" That is surprising," answered Curran, " for I have been 
practicing all night." 

While thus lying ill, Curran remarked to his friend, 
Father O'Leary, who also loved his joke : "I wish, O'Leary, 
you had the keys of heaven." 

"Why, Curran?" 

"Because you could let me in." 

" It would be much better for you," said the good- 
humored priest, "if I had the keys of the other place, be- 
cause I could let you out." 



150 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Of the elaborate but confused exposition of a point of 
law given by a learned sergeant, Curran said : 

" He reminds me of a fool I once saw trying to open 
an oyster with a rolling pin." 

Of the speech of a member of Parliament: 

" It was like a long parenthesis, because that is a para- 
graph winch may be omitted from beginning to end with- 
out any loss of meaning." 

And of the address of Hewett: 

" It put me exactly in mind of a familiar utensil called 
an extinguisher: It began at a point, and on it went 
widening and widening, until at last it fairly put out the 
subject altogether." 

When asked what he thought of a certain speech in 
the House of Lords — made by an able speaker addicted 
to lofty language — he replied : 

" I had only the advantage of hearing Lord airing 

his vocabulary." 

Curran's wit, at times, was extremely bitter, as when 
asked by a young poet whom he disliked: 
" Have you seen my ' Descent into Hell ? ' " 
" No ; I should be delighted to see it." 

John Egan, a big, brawny Irish lawyer, commonly 
known as "Bully Egan," quarreled with Curran, who 
was of slight and diminutive stature. A duel followed. 
On the ground Egan complained that the disparity be- 
tween his immense girth and height and Curran's size 
gave his antagonist a great advantage. 

" I might as well fire at a razor's edge as at Curran," 
said Egan, " and he may hit me as easily as a turf stack." 

"Egan," replied Curran, "I wish to take no advantage 
of you. Let my size be chalked upon your front, and I 
am quite content that every shot which hits outside that 
mark shall not count." 



BENCH AND BAR. 151 

Rising to cross-examine a witness before a learned 
judge, who could not comprehend a jest, Curran observed 
that he began to laugh before a single question had been 
asked. 

" What are you laughing at, friend ? " asked Curran ; 
" what are you laughing at ? Let me tell you that a laugh 
without a joke is like — is like — " 

" Like what, Mr. Curran ? " interposed the jndge, im- 
agining he was at fault. 

" Like a contingent remainder without any particular 
estate to support it." 

A politician, wishing to elevate himself by giving a de- 
scription of Ireland's grievances, asked Curran to supply 
him with a list of them. The latter, understanding the 
selfish motives of the former, declined granting his re- 
quest. When asked by a friend why he had refused, Cur- 
ran replied : 

" At my time of life, I have no notion of turning hod- 
man to any political architect." 

When Curran happened to say that he could never speak 
in public over a quarter of an hour without moistening 
his lips, Sir Thomas Turton observed: 

" I have the advantage of you, for I spoke the other 
night in the House of Commons for five hours, and never 
felt the least thirsty." 

" It is very remarkable, indeed," rejoined Curran, " for 
everyone agrees that it was the driest speech of the ses- 
sion." 

To a remark of Lord Clare, who curtly exclaimed at 
one of his legal positions, " If that be law, Mr. Curran, I 
may burn my law-books ! " he replied, " Better read them, 
my lord." 

Curran was once engaged in a legal argument, and be- 
hind him stood his colleague, a gentleman remarkably 



152 WIT AND HUMOR 

tall and slender, and who had originally designed to taKe 
orders. The judge observing that the case involved a 
question of ecclesiastical law, Curran said: 

" I can refer your lordship to a high authority behind 
me, who was once intended for the church; though " — in 
a whisper to a friend beside him — "in my opinion, he 
was fitter for the steeple." 

A barrister entered one of the Four Courts, Dublin, 
with his wig so much awry as to cause a general titter. 
Seeing Curran smile, he said: 

" Do you see anything ridiculous in my wig ? " 

"Nothing but the head." 

On a bill of indictment in which Curran was interested, 
the grand jurors came into court to explain " why it was 
ignored." Curran, vexed by the stupidity of the jury, said 
to the foreman : 

" You, sir, can have no objection to write upon the back 
of the bill " Ignoramus, for self and fellows. It will then 
be a true bill." 

Being retained against a young captain, indicted for a 
gross assault, Curran, in his opening, said: 

"My lord, I am counsel for the crown, and I am first 
to acquaint your lordship that this soldier — " 

" Nay, sir," says the military hero, " I would have you 
know, sir, I am an officer ! " 

" O, sir, I beg your pardon; this officer who is no sol- 
dier." 

Curran was at Cheltenham when his friends drew at- 
tention to a fashionable Irish gentleman who had the 
ugly habit of keeping his tongue exposed as he went 
along. On being asked what his countryman's motive 
could be, Curran readily hazarded the reply: " Oh! he's 
evidently trying to catch the English accent." 



BENCH AND BAR. 153 

To a prosy member who asked him if he had read his 
last speech, he replied: "I hope I have." 

Hearing that a very stingy and slovenly barrister had 
started for the continent with a shirt and a guinea, he 
observed : 

" He'll not change either till he comes back. 

Curran was pleading before Fitzgibbon, the Irish chan- 
cellor, with whom he was on terms of anything but friend- 
ship. The chancellor, with the distinct purpose, as it 
would seem, of insulting the advocate, brought with him 
on to the bench a large Newfoundland dog, to which he 
devoted a good deal of his attention while Curran was 
addressing a very elaborate argument to him. At a very 
material point in the speech the judge turned quite away 
and seemed to be wholly engrossed with his dog. Curran 
•ceased to speak. 

" Go on, go on, Mr. Curran," said the chancellor. 

" Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, my lord; I really was 
under the impression that your lordships were in consulta- 
tion." 

Lord Abernethy had the habit of contemptuously shak- 
ing his head during Curran's addresses to the jury, and 
Curran, in one of the cases, fearing the jury would be 
influenced, assured them his lordship was not expressing 
■dissent. " When he shakes his head there's nothing in it" 

Davy, Sergeant. — Upon an action of assault and bat- 
tery, an advocate was warmly laying out the cause of his 
client : " In short, said he, " I have pledged myself to 
plead this cause with all the learning, all the law, and all 
the credit I have." 

" That's right," said Davy, " the man who pledges him- 
self to nothing may easily keep his word." 



154 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Davy, being concerned in a cause which he wanted put 
off for a few clays, asked Lord Mansfield when he would 
bring it on. 

" Friday next," said the judge 

" Will you consider, my lord, Friday next will be Good 
Friday?" 

" I do not care for that," said the judge petulantly, " I 
shall sit for all that." 

"Well, my lord, to be sure you may do as you please; 
but if you do, I believe you will be the first judge to do 
business on Good Friday since Pontius Pilate." 

A gentleman once appeared in the Court of King's 
Bench as surety for a friend in the sum of three thousand 
pounds. Davy, though he well knew the responsibility 
of the gentleman, could not help his customary imperti- 
nence: 

" Well, sir, how do you make yourself to be worth three 
thousand pounds ? " 

The gentleman specified the particulars up to two thou- 
sand nine hundred and forty pounds. 

"Ay," said Davy, " that is not enough by sixty." 

"For that sum," replied the other, "I have a note of 
hand of one Sergeant Davy, and I hope he will have the 
honesty soon to discharge it." 

This set the whole court in a roar; the sergeant was 
for once abashed, and Lord Mansfield said : 

"Well, brother, I think we may accept the bail." 

Davy looked well to substantial fees for his professional 
services. He once had a large brief, with a fee of two 
guineas only at the back of it. His client asked him if he 
had read his brief. He pointed with his finger to the fee, 
3»nd said, " as far as that I have read, and for the life of 
me, I can read no farther." 



BENCH AND BAR. 155- 

He was engaged at the Old Bailey, and, a very strong 
oase having been made out, Judge Gould asked who was 
concerned for the prisoner. Davy replied, " My lord, I 
am concerned for him; very much concerned after what 
I have heard." 

Day, William R.— Judge Day, of Canton, Ohio, as a 
lawyer, jurist and statesman, ranks high among the emi- 
nent men of his country. 

A friend, writing of him, says: Diplomacy has been de- 
fined as the gentle art of lying: Judge Day hasn't it, and 
his success in the peace negotiations of Paris was a trib- 
ute to sterling yet tactful American truthfulness. Old 
World diplomats, accustomed to verbal feints and par- 
ries, could not understand this quiet, determined Ameri- 
can, who said what he meant the first time and stuck to 
it. By raising a smudge of argument around the lan- 
guage of the protocol, they expected to confuse the main 
issue. But this village lawyer of Canton, accustomed to- 
the clear statement of cases before a befogged jury, saw 
straight through their arts and argued well for his mighty 
client, the American nation. 

A Madrid newspaper, commenting on the personality 
of the American Peace Commission, said of President 
Day: "He is a provincial lawyer without knowledge of 
diplomacy." A witty writer in the London Mail, refer- 
ring to this remark, said : u They cannot understand him : 
he means what he says." 

One of the most prominent judges of Canton, Ohio,, 
where Day has lived nearly all his life, says of him: "He 
is a genius at truth-telling. When he states a case he does- 
it so clearly and honestly that the jury cannot help be- 
lieving him." 



156 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Mr. Austin Lynch, one of Judge Day's partners, ss.js 
that one of the most remarkable things about Judge Day 
was his untiring industry as a student of the law. Un- 
like many lawyers, he did not stop his reading with his 
admission to the bar. There was never a case too ab- 
struse nor even a precedent too remote to engage his 
attention. His associates in Canton say that they never 
have known his equal in presenting an honest, compre- 
hensive statement of a case before a court or a jury. He 
never wasted words, he was rarely oratorical. As a cross- 
examiner he had the reputation of being exceedingly 
shrewd, with an astonishing quickness of repartee. 

De Facto and De Jure. — A disciple of Coke, in 
Charleston, South Carolina, when asked by a " brudder " 
to explain the Latin terms de facto and de jure, replied: 
" Dey means dat you must prove de facts to de satisfac- 
tion ob dejury" 

Demurrer.— The old Yankee's answer to " What is 
a demurrer ? " is a quaint definition : 

" It's a pleadin' of, ' Wal, sposin' it's so — wot of it ? 



1 V 



A young attorney's argument on a demurrer: " May it 
please your honor, this is a stupendous question. Its de- 
cision by you this day will live in judicial history long 
after you and I shall have passed from this scene of earthly 
glory and sublunary vanity. When the tower of Pisa 
shall be forgotten; when Waterloo and Bunker Hill shall 
grow dim in the distant cycles of receding centuries; 
when the names of Napoleon, Marlborough, and Wash- 
ington are no longer remembered; when the pyramids of 
the Pharaohs shall have crumbled into dust; when the 
hippopotamus shall cease to inhabit its native Nile, — even 
then your ruling on this demurrer will still survive in the 



BENCH AND BAR 157 

antique volumes of legal lore, fresh, green and imperish- 
able." 

Francis Hopkinson, of Pennsylvania, was a noted jurist 
and writer of the Revolutionary period. The following 
illustration of hair-splitting points arising on a demurrer 
is drawn from his " Specimen of a Modern Law-suit: " 

This was an action on the statute of Patrick 4, chapter 
16, called the Statute of Nails, which prohibits all sub- 
jects within the realm from cutting or paring their nails 
on a Friday, under the penalty of twenty shillings for 
every offence, to be recovered by the overseers of the 
poor, for the use of the poor of the county in which the 
offence should be committed. Mistake and others were 
overseers of the poor for the county of Antrim, and 
brought their action under the statute against the de- 
fendant. And it was in proof that the defendant had 
pared his thumb-nails and his great toe-nails on Friday, 

to wit, on Friday the day of , at twelve o'clock 

in the night of the same day. 

Counsel for the defendant demurred to the facts, ob- 
serving that, as this was a penal law, it ought to be 
strictly construed. And thereupon took three points of 
defence, viz. : First, it was urged that night is not day, 
and the statute expressly says Fri-day and not Fri-night; 
and the proof is that the cutting was at night. Secondly, 
it was contended that twelve o'clock on Friday night is, 
in fact, the beginning of Saturday morning, and there- 
fore not within the statute. And thirdly, that the words 
of the statute are ungues digitorum, — Anglice, the nails 
of the fingers, and the testimony only respects thumbs 
and great toes. 

The jury gave in a special verdict; whereupon, after 
long advisement, the judges were unanimously of opin- 
ion, on the first point, that, in construction of law, day 



158 WIT AND HUMOR. 

is night and night is day; because a day consists of 
twenty-four hours, and the law will not allow of frac- 
tions of a day; de minimis non curat lex; in English, the 
law does'nt stand upon trifles. On the second point, 
that twelve o'clock at night, being the precise line of 
division between Friday night and Saturday morning, is 
a portion or point of time which may be considered as 
belonging to both, or to either, or to neither, at the dis- 
cretion of the court. And thirdly, that, in construction 
of law, fingers are thumbs and thumbs are fingers, and 
thumbs and fingers are great toes and little toes, and 
great toes and little toes are thumbs and fingers ; and so 
judgment for the plaintiff. 

Denman, Lord.— The mere repetition of the Canti- 
lena of lawyers cannot make it law, unless it can be 
traced to some competent authority; and, if it be irrec- 
oncilable, to some clear legal principle. 

— O* Connell v. The Queen. 

A delusion, a mockery, and a snare. — Ibid. 

Depew, Chauncey M. — Depew, of international 
fame — lawyer, politician, railway manager, — is a gifted 
and witty speaker of rare persuasive power. He spoke 
one evening during a presidential campaign at a town in 
the interior of New York. The next morning the chair- 
man of the local committee took him in his carriage for 
a ride about the place. They had reached the suburbs 
and were admiring a bit of scenery when a man wearing 
a blue shirt and carrying a long whip on his shoulder 
approached from where he had been piloting an ox-team 
along the middle of the street, and said : 

" You're the man that made the rattlin' speech up at 
iihe hall last night, I guess?" 



BENCH AND BAR. 159 

Depew modestly admitted that he had indulged in 
some talk at the time and place specified. 

" Didn't you have what you said writ out ? " went on 
the man. 

" No," replied the orator. 

" You don't mean to say you made that all right up as 
you went along ? " 

" Yes." 

" Jess hopped right up there, took a drink o' water out 
of the pitcher, hit the table a whack and waded in with- 
out no thinkin' nor nothin' ? " 

" Well, I suppose you might put it that way." 

" Well, that beats me. You'll excuse me for stoppin' 
you, but what I wanted to say was that your speech con- 
vinced me, though I knowed all the time that it was the 
peskiest lie that was ever told. I made up my mind to 
vote your ticket, but I'd been willin' to bet a peck o' red 
apples that no man could stand up and tell such blamed 
convincin' lies without havin' 'em writ out. You must 
V had an awful lot of practice." 

Depew's address to the graduating class of the Syracuse 
Medical College is full of bright, suggestive things. Speak- 
ing of the professions, he said: 

" They are crowded with incompetents. I know min- 
isters who should be palace-car conductors ; poor lawyers 
who would have been good drummers or clerks; and 
medical men who are more dangerous to their patients 
than the diseases they treat, who were designed by nat- 
ure for the farm or the factory. The world is a work- 
shop full of misfits, and misfits are always cheap. It 
requires both faculty and courage, when you have dis- 
covered your mistake, to drop your tools and start again. 
But if all the doctors, lawyers and ministers who never 
can get on in their professions would get out and find 



160 WIT AND HUMOR. 

other fields of labor, it would be infinitely better for them- 
selves and the country." 

At the New England Society dinner, in 1890, Depew, 
after paying a glowing tribute to the Yankee, said in a 
humorous vein: 

The merit of the Yankee as a piece of human dynamite 
is that he is never satisfied. " This is heaven," said St. 
Peter to a new-comer who did not seem to appreciate 
his surroundings. " Yes," said he, " I suppose so ; but I 
am from Boston." 

The Puritan had always an interrogation mark before 
his face as large as a pothook which hung from the crane 
in the ample fire-place of the colonial kitchen. He was 
and is in faith an original thinker, and in politics a Mug- 
wump. He accepts the truth of the Scriptures and then 
puts upon them his own interpretation. He is in thor- 
ough sympathy with the — 

John P. Robinson, he 

Said they didn't know everything down in Judee. 

Against the Stuarts and the Episcopacy in the Old 
World; against Democratic subserviency to the slave 
power and Whig fear of attacking it in the New ; against 
party idols without souls, and bosses without principles, 
he was and is always a kicker. The Dutchman, with his 
mild tendency to superstition and fondness for legends, 
would have joined in the ghost dance, but the Puritan 
would have examined the ghost. The Yankee stops a 
panic or restores confidence by going like a rifle ball 
straight for the mark. " Where was Starvation Camp 
located ? " said a Hartford man through his nose to the 
great explorer, Stanley. u On the bank of the Congo," 
answered the traveler. " Waal, then," said the Yankee, 
" why didn't you fish ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 161 

Mr. John Kendrick Bangs, the humorist, received the 
following letter from a city in one of the Pacific states: 

" John K. Bangs — Dear Sir: I have been asked to re- 
spond to a toast at our Board of Trade's annual dinner 
next month, and I write to inquire what would be your 
lowest terms for preparing a good, rattling funny speech 
for me to deliver on that occasion. A prompt reply will 
oblige, Yours very truly, 



To which Mr. Bangs immediately sat down and penned 
the following answer: 

" Dear Sir: — I am in receipt of your esteemed favor 

of the inst., and in reply would say that my regular 

rate for after-dinner speeches is $500 per speech. I have 
not as yet, however, opened up this line of goods in the 
west, and, as I am anxious to secure custom in that part 
of the country, I will offer you special terms, namely, 
$250 for such an address as you describe, the amount to> 
be sent as soon as shipment is made. If the terms pro- 
posed are satisfactory, kindly let me know at once, but. 
in that case I would request you not to mention the mat- 
ter to Chauncey Depew or General Horace Porter, as I 
should not like them to know that I am cutting rates. 
" Yours truly, 

" John Kendrick Bangs." 

This letter was duly sent, and on the day when it 
reached its destination Mr. Bangs received the following 
telegram : 

"Your letter just received. If Chauncey Depew's 
speeches are written by you, then I don't want one." 

Divorce. — 'Lias Bugson, the hue of whose complex- 
ion gained for the old man the nickname of Pitch, went 
to Little Rock, Arkansas, and called upon a lawyer. 
11 



162 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" You want a divorce, I suppose," said the lawyer when 
'Lias entered. 

" Dat's it, sah ; but how did you guess it ? " 

" Well, there is such a rush for divorces that I thought 
you might belong to the crowd. They all come to me. 
Upon what grounds will you apply for a divorce ? " 

" 'Zertion." 

" Desertion, eh ? " 

" Dat's it. Now, how much yer gwine charge me ? " 

" I won't be hard on you. I'll take the case for $10." 

" An' not charge me nothin' lessen yer git de 'vorce ? " 

"Oh, I'll have to charge you anyway." 

'Lias, after a moment's reflection, replied: 

" I kain' go inter sich er trade ez dat. It's too bindin' 
on merse'f." 

" Are you sure that you can prove desertion ? " 

" Jes ez sho ez I is dat I'se libin'." 

" Well, if I gain the case give me $10 ; if not, you 
needn't give me anj^thing." 

" 'Pears like it's sorter too much on yer own side yet. 
Now, lemme tell yer. I'se er sort o' bizniz pusson, an' 
I'll 'rgee ter dis fack wid yer. Ef I prove 'zertion an' 
yer den doan git de 'vorce, yer mus' gin me five dollars, 
an' if yer does git it, I'll gin yer ten. Mine, now, dat ef 
I kain' prube de 'zertion I doan claim nothin'." 

"Wilful desertion?" 

" Yes, sah." 

"Well, I believe I'll take that." 

" All right, sah, les put de money up." 

The money was given to a stakeholder, and the bill for 
divorce was filed. When the trial came on, the lawyer, 
whispering to his client, said: "You'd better make a 
statement, and then let the witnesses be introduced." 

" I doan b'lebe cle witnesses is o' any use." 



BENCH AND BAR. 163 

"Why?" 

" 'Case de cou't '11 take my word." 

The lawyer laughed. The negro was called upon to 
make a statement. 

" Genermen o' dis heah cou't," said he, " I said dat dar 
wa'nt no use in witnesses, 'case de cou't would take my 
word. Mr. Lawyer, I said dat I'd prube 'zertion in dis 
case, didn' I ? " 

" Yes." 

" Uh huh, dat's whut I said, an' I'll do it." 

" Introduce a witness," said the judge. 

"Eo use, Jedge." 

"Why?" 

" 'Case I knows dat I 'zerted de lady." 

" You deserted her ? " 

" Yas, sah. Said dat I'd prube 'zertion. Er haw, haw, 
stakeholder, gin me mer $5." 

The judge, after hearing an explanation of the arrange- 
ment, said : " Give him the $5." 

" Thankee, Jedge," said the negro, when he had received 
the money. " Thankee, sah. Yer see, I wuz outer 'ploy- 
ment, an' knowing dat dis heah lawyer is alius airter nig- 
gers ter git 'vorces, I thought I'd work him er little." 

" You didn't want a divorce, I suppose," said the judge. 

"Bless yer soul, no sah. Dar ain't no nigger in de 
country dat's got er better lady den I has." 

" And you were merely playing with the court ? " 

" Dat's all, sah. Er haw, haw ! Oh, dar's er heep er 
fun erbout dis ole nigger." 

" Mr. Clerk," said the judge, " enter up a fine of $50 
against Mr. 'Lias Bugson." 

" Good Lawd, Jedge ; whut fur ? " 

"For playing with the court. Oh," mimicking the 
negro, " dar's er heap er fun erbout dis old Jedge." 



164 WIT AND HUMOR. 

James D. Colt of the Massachusetts Supreme Court was 
not only a good judge but had a vein of genuine humor, 
which often enlivened a monotonous trial. Some time be- 
fore his death he was holding court in Cambridge, and 
spent the day in hearing divorce cases. The day was hot, 
and the cases tiresome. The court was to adjourn that 
afternoon until the next session. As he began a case, he 
announced that it would be the last he should hear. The 
late Charles K. Train, for some years attorney-general, 
had a divorce case on the list for trial. He begged the 
judge to hear it. 

" No," said the wearied judge, " there must be an end 
to this business somewhere, and I cannot hear any more 
this term." 

Mr. Train pleaded the great necessity of his client being 
heard, but the judge was inexorable, and Mr. Train left 
the court and started for his home in Framingham. Not 
so his fair client She was pleading for separation from 
an unfaithful husband, and she remained until the close. 
Judge Colt was gathering up his papers preparatory to 
having the court adjourned. The woman saw the situa- 
tion, and jumping up from her seat in the back part of 
the room, said : 

" Judge, I want you to hear my case?" 

"Who is your attorney?" asked the judge, sternly. 

" Mr. Train, but he has gone home." 

" Did you hear me say that I would hear no more cases 
this term?" 

"Yes, but you must hear my case." 

"Why so?" 

" Pm engaged to he married and the cards are out" 

A smile went over the judge's face and he turned to 
the clerk of the court and said : 

" Mr. Clerk, what had we better do ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 1G5 

" Hear the case." 

" Bring on j r our witnesses," said the judge to the woman, 
who complied, and took the stand herself. It was a clear 
case, and without opposition. In ten minutes the evidence 
was finished. " Enter a decree, Mr. Clerk," said the judge, 
"and you, Mr. Crier, make the proclamation." 

The judge left immediately for home, and the woman 
went out of court in the best of spirits, to resume the now 
relation a few days hence, " for better or for worse." 

Docly, John M. — The sayings of Judge Dooly, em- 
inent as a jurist and famous as a wit, are proverbial gems 
in the wit and humor of the Georgia bar. 

The year 1818 was known as the dry year in Georgia, 
in which corn did not mature at all in large portions of 
the state. 

« I've got the corn which will stand the drought," said 
Austin Edwards, the landlord of Elberton Hotel, to Dooly ; 
I got the seed from a Tennessee hog-driver, and planted 
a square in my garden ; every stalk had six large ears, and 
hanging to the tassel was a nice little gourd full of shelled 
corn. It beats all natur', Judge ! Did you ever hear the 
like ? " 

The judge listened to the landlord with great gravity, 
and replied : 

" Why, Austin, 'tain't a circumstance to the corn made 
by our friend Tom Haynes, of Hancock county. At 
court there, last week, I staid with Tom. He was just fin- 
ishing gathering in a piece of bottom land which he 
cleared last winter and planted in June. It never rained 
upon it at all. He turned his hogs in to eat the almost 
dried-up small stalks. Going to look after his hogs the 
next morning, he saw an old one in great glee with a large 
ear of corn in her mouth. He couldn't imagine where she 



166 WIT AND HUMOR. 

had got it; but, on examining closely, he found she had 
rooted it up from the foot of a dried-up corn-stalk. As- 
tonished, he looked at another, and another. He then 
had his field well dug over, and found from one to ten 
ears at the root all over the field. He said he made an 
excellent crop." 

"Well, well," said Austin, "that beats my corn. I 
must have some of that seed." 

It was thus Dooly handled great liars. 

In 1819, a young attorney, John Jacks, was spouting 
furiously against John C. Calhoun, the great statesman 
of South Carolina : 

" He oughtn't to be elected constable in his district. 
He hasn't either talents or principles," said Jacks. 

Dooly heard him out and replied : 

"Mr. Jacks, I know Mr. Calhoun well; and I am cer- 
tain of his modesty and great respect for public opinion ; 
and if you will write him, he will take down his name, 
and not run for Congress at all." 

While Dooly was holding court in Washington county,. 
Georgia, General Hanson, a great blower, seated himself 
by the side of the judge, and commenced giving him an 
account of his various pieces of property, to impress the 
judge with an idea of his great wealth. 

" Stop a moment," said the judge. " Mr. Sheriff, call in 
John Jones, the Receiver of Tax Returns." 

Jones soon made his appearance. 

" Mr. Receiver," continued the judge, " come up here 
and make an inventory of General Hanson's property. 
He has mistaken me for you." 

The boarders of a tavern in Georgia were annoyed by 
flies in their butter. Dooly took the tavernkeeper aside, 
and remarked to him, in a private way, that some of his 



BENCH AND BAR 167 

Mends thought it would be best for him to put the but- 
ter on one piate and the flies on another, and iet the peo- 
ple mix them to suit themselves. He merely suggested 
it for consideration. 

Dooly was a man of undoubted bravery as well as wag- 
gery. Once he had the misfortune to offend Judge White, 
who challenged Dooly to mortal combat. White wore a 
cork leg. The two judges met on the field at the hour 
appointed, but Dooly was alone. White sent to ask where 
his second was. 

" He has gone to the woods for a bit of hollow tree to 
put one of my legs in, that we may be even," Dooly re- 
plied. 

The answer was too much for his opponent; he turned 
on the only heel he had, and left the field 

Douglas, Stephen A. — Douglas, in his campaign 
against Lincoln, spoke in front of a western hotel, and 
Old Kube was an attentive listener. Afterwards he was 
asked by Mr. Hall, a prominent attorney, what he thought 
of the speech. 

" Dat was heaby doctrine," said he — " de heabiest kind 
ob doctrine. But dar was lots ob ign'ant folks dar, Mr. 
Hall, dat didn't understand dat doctrine — not a bit of it. 
Dey didn't understand it, Mr. Hall, no more'n you did." 

Douglas was very demonstrative in his professions of 
regard. One day he sat down on Beverly Tucker's knee, 
put his arm around the Virginian's neck, and exclaimed 
in his impulsive way: 

"Bev., old boy, I love you." 

"Douglas," says Tucker, "will you always love me?" 

"Yes, Beverly, I will." 

" But," persisted Tucker, " will you love me when you 
get to be President ? " 



168 WIT AND HUMOR 

"If 1 don't may I be blanked ! " says Douglas. " What 
do you want me to do for you ? " 

" "Well," says Tucker, " when you get to be President, 
all I want you to do for me is to pick out some public 
place and put your arm around my neck, just as you are 
doing now, and call me Bev." 

On one of those memorable days when the Kansas- 
Nebraska bill was being debated, Senator Seward tapped 
Douglas on the shoulder and whispered in his ear that he 
had some "Bourbon " in the Senator's private room, which 
was twenty years old, aud upon it he desired to get 
Douglas' judgment. The " Little Giant " declined, stat- 
ing that he meant to speak in a few minutes, and wished 
his brain unclouded by the fumes of liquor. At the con- 
clusion of his speech Douglas sank down exhausted in his 
chair, hardly conscious of the congratulations of those 
who flocked around him. At this juncture Seward seized 
the orator's arm and bore him off to the senatorial sanc- 
tum. " Here's the Bourbon, Douglas," said Seward, " try 
some; it's sixty years old." " Seward," remarked Doug- 
las, " I have made to-day the longest speech ever deliv- 
ered; history has no parallel for it." "How is that?" 
rejoined Seward, " you spoke about two hours only." 
Douglas, smiling, replied: "Don't you recollect that a 
moment before I obtained the floor you invited me to 
partake of some Bourbon twenty years old, and now, im- 
mediately after closing my remarks, you extend to me 
some of the same liquor, with the assertion that it is sixty 
years old ! — a forty years' speech was never delivered 
before." Seward acknowledged the " corn," and the two 
enemies (politically) " smiled." 

Dowse, Richard. — Dowse, who was a Baron of the 
Irish Court of Exchequer from 1872 till his death in 1890, 
was trying a case on circuit where the prisoner could 



BENCH AND BAR. 169 

only understand Irish, and accordingly an interpreter 
was sworn. The prisoner said something to the inter- 
preter, and the interpreter replied to him. 

" What does he say ? " demanded the judge. 

" Nothing, my lord." 

" How dare you say that, when we all heard it ? Come, 
sir, what did he say ? " 

"My lord, it has nothing to do with the case." 

" If }^ou don't answer I shall commit you, sir. Now, 
what did he say?" 

"Well, my lord, you'll excuse me, but he said, 'Who 
is that old woman, with the red bed-curtain round her, 
sitting up there ? ' " 

"And what did you say?" asked his lordship. 

" I said to him : ' Whisht, my boy, that is the old fel- 
low as is going to hang you ! ' ,; 

Drummond, Thomas .—Once Matt Carpenter under- 
took to play fast and loose in an argument before Judge 
Drummond. He was interrupted: 

" Mr. Carpenter, you helped to pass this law. A man 
should be ashamed to quibble over a law of his own 
making." 

As Carpenter went out of the court room, smarting 
under the rebuke like a whipped school boy, he remarked 
to a friend: 

" Old Tom Drummond is the ablest legal mind this 
country has produced. I say it without reserve." 

Eldon, Lord.— William Mathews, LL. D., in his de- 
lightfully written and instructive volume Getting On in 
the World, writing of the early struggles and later triumphs 
of Eldon, says: 

" John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, rose at first slowly 



170 WIT AND HUMOR. 

to distinction. While studying law at London, he rose at 
four every morning and studied till late at night, binding 
a wet towel around his head to keep himself awake. Too 
poor to study under a special pleader, he copied out three 
folio volumes from a manuscript collection of precedents. 
When finallv called to the bar, he hung- long about the 
courts without employment. His prospects were so gloomy 
that he meditated leaving the metropolis and settling 
down as a provincial barrister in Newcastle, where a com- 
fortable house in High street was his castle in the air. 
It was agreed between him and his wife that whatever 
he got during the first eleven months should be his, and 
whatever he got in the twelfth month should be hers. 
'What a stingy dog,' he says, ' I must have been to have 
made such a bargain ! I would not have done so after- 
wards. But, however, so it was; and how do you think 
it turned out? In the twelfth month 1 received half a 
guinea; eighteen pence went for fees, and Bessy got nine 
shillings; in the other eleven months I got but one shil- 
ling.' 

"■In the second year of his profession, 'business,' wrote 
the elder brother, William, to the second, Henry, 6 is very 
dull with poor Jack, — very dull indeed; and, of conse- 
quence, he is not very lively. I heartily wish that busi- 
ness may brisken a little, or he will be heartily sick of his 
profession. I do all I can to keep up his spirits, but he is 
very gloomy.' Early in the third year occurred a case 
which laid the foundation of his fame. As he left West- 
minster Hall, a respectable solicitor touched him on the 
shoulder, and said, ' Young man, your bread and butter 
is cut for life.' In about eight years from his call to the 
bar he was on the high road to its highest honors. Dur- 
ing the six years he was attorney-general, his annual emol- 
uments varied from 10,0002. to 12,0002. 



BENCH AND BAR. 171 

* After he had become lord chancellor, an application 
was made to him one day to allow a young man an in- 
come of two hundred a year out of an estate in dispute. 
* Young gentleman,' said Lord Eldon, seeing the applicant 
in court, ' I hope that you will reflect that this is a very 
critical order I am making in your favor. This sum may 
furnish opportunity to talent, or it may paralyze all exer- 
tions. If I had had a certain two hundred a year at your 
age, I should not now be sitting where I am.' When "Wil- 
berforce asked the chancellor's advice about the best 
mode of study for the young Grants, to fit them for the 
bar, — ' I have no rule to give them,' was the reply, ' but 
that they must make up their minds to live like a hermit 
and work like a horse.' " 

Eldon's humorous playfulness appears in his letter to 
Dr. Fisher, an applicant for preferment : 

"Dear Fisher (he wrote on one side of the letter sheet) : 
" I cannot to-day give you the preferment for which you 
ask. " Your sincere friend, 

" Eldon. 

" Turn over; " and on the other side, " I gave it to you 
yesterday." 

A pretty story is that of Miss Bridge's call upon Eldon. 
Eldon was sitting in his study, over a table of papers,, 
when a young and lovely girl — slightiy rustic in her at- 
tire, slightly embarrassed by the novelty of her position, 
but thoroughly in command of her wits — entered the 
room, and walked up to the lawyer's chair. 

" My dear," said the chancellor, rising and bowing with 
old-world courtesy, " who are you ? " 

" Lord Eldon," answered the blushing maiden, " I am 
Bessie Bridge of Weobly, the daughter of the vicar of 
Weobly, and papa has sent me to remind you of a promise 
which you made him when I was a little baby, and you 



172 WIT AND HUMOR. 

were a guest in the house, on the occasion of your first 
election as member of Parliament for "Weobly." 

"A promise, my dear young lady?" interposed the 
chancellor, trying to recall how he had pledged himself. 

" Yes, Lord Eldon, a promise. You were standing over 
my cradle when papa said to you, ' Mr. Scott, promise me 
that if ever you are lord chancellor, when my little girl 
is a poor clergyman's wife, you will give her husband a 
living;' and you answered, 'Mr. Bridge, my promise is 
not worth half-a-crown, but I give it to you, wishing it 
were worth more.' " 

Enthusiastically the chancellor exclaimed, "You are 
quite right. I admit the obligation. I remember all 
about it; " and, then, after a pause, archly surveying the 
damsel, whose graces were the reverse of matronly, he 
added, " But surely the time for keeping my promise has 
not yet arrived ? You cannot be any one's wife at pres- 
ent?" 

For a few seconds Bessie hesitated for an answer, and 
then, with a blush and a ripple of silver laughter, she re- 
plied, " "No, but I do so wish to be somebody's wife. I am 
engaged to a young clergyman, and there's a living in 
Herefordshire near my old home that has recently fallen 
vacant, and if you'll give it to Alfred, why then, Lord 
Eldon, we shal 1 marry before the end of the year." 

Is there need to say that the chancellor forthwith sum- 
mon3d his secretary, that the secretary made out the pres- 
entation to Bessie's lover, and that, having given the 
chancellor a kiss of gratitude, Bessie made good speed 
back to Herefordshire, hugging the precious document 
the whole way home ? 

While at the bar, John Scott (Lord Eldon), in pleading 
before the House of Lords one day, happened to say in 
his broadest Scotch accent: " In plain English, ma lords." 



BENCH AND BAR. 1^3 

Upon which a noble lord jocosely remarked: " In plain 
Scotch you mean, Mr. Scott." 

The prompt advocate instantly rejoined: " Nae matter ! 
in plain common sense, ma lords, and that's the same in 
a' languages, ye'll ken." 

On another occasion, before a committee of the House 
of Lords, using the word " water," he pronounced it in his 
native Doric as " watter." 

The noble lord, the chairman, had the rudeness to in- 
terpose with the remark: 

" In England, Mr. Scott, we spell water with one " t." 

Scott was for a moment taken back, but his native wit 
reasserted itself, and he rejoined : 

" There may na be twa ' t's ' in watter, my lord, but 
there are twa 'n's' in manners." 

" My lord, I assure you there is no understanding be- 
tween us,' 1 exclaimed an eminent English lawyer who 
had been suspected of collusion with the counsel who 
represented the other side. 

Lord Eldon thereupon observed : 

"I once heard a squire in the House of Commons say 
of himself and another squire: 'We never through life 
had one idea between us ; ' but I tremble for the suitors 
when I am told that two distinguished practitioners have 
no understanding between them! " 

Capital are some of the stories concerning Eldon and 

his ecclesiastical patronage. Dating the letter from Eo. 2' 

Charlotte Street, Pimlico, the chancellor's eldest son sent 

his father the following anonymous epistle: — 

"Hear, generous lawyer! hear my prayer, 
Nor let my freedom make you stare, 

In hailing you Jack Scott! 
Tho' now upon the woolsack placed, 
With wealth, with power, with title graced, 

Once nearer was our lot. 



174 WIT AND HUMOR. 

"Say by what name the hapless bard 
May best attract your kind regard — 

Plain Jack ? — Sir John ? — or Eldon* 
Give from your ample store of giving, 
A starving priest some little living — 

The world will cry out ' Well done.' 

* In vain, without a patron's aid, 
I've prayed and preached, and preached and prayed — 

Applauded but ill-fed. 
Such vain eclat let others share; 
Alas, I cannot feed on air — 

I ask not praise, but bread." 

Satisfactorily hoaxed by the rhymer, the chancellor 
went to Pimlico in search of the clerical poetaster, and 
found him not. 

Eldon disliked Boswell, and one of his brightest say- 
ings was his reply to the latter 's importunate entreaties 
for a definition of the word " taste." 

" Boswell, we must have an end of this. ' Taste,' ac- 
cording to my definition, is the judgment you manifested 
when you determined to quit Scotland and come to the 
south." 

When Eldon presented an anti-Catholic petition from 
the company of tailors at Glasgow, the chancellor, still 
sitting on the woolsack, said in a stage whisper, loud 
enough to be heard in the galleries: 

" What ! do tailors trouble themselves with such meas- 
ures ? " 

" My noble and learned friend might have been aware," 
replied Eldon, " that tailors cannot like turn-coats." 

It was a famous saying of Eldon's that " some barris- 
ters succeeded by great talents, some by high connec- 
tions, some by miracle, but the great majority by com- 
mencing without a shilling." 



BENCH AND BAR. 175 

It was the habit of Eldon, when attorney-general, to 
close his speeches with some remarks justifying his own 
character. At the trial of Home Tooke, speaking of his 
own reputation, he said : 

" It is the little inheritance I have to leave my chil- 
dren, and, by God's help, I will leave it unimpaired." 

Here he shed tears, and, to the astonishment of those 
present, Mitford, an attorney, began to weep. 

"Just look at Mitford," said a by-stander to Tooke; 
u what on earth is he crying for ? " 

Tooke replied: "He is weeping to think what a small 
inheritance Eldon's children are likely to get." 

Of William and John Scott, afterward Lord Stowell 
and Lord Eldon, Lord John Kussell used to tell with infinite 
zest a story which he declared to be highly characteristic 
of the methods by which they made their fortunes and 
position. When they were young men at the bar, having 
had a stroke of professional luck, they determined to cel- 
ebrate the occasion by having a dinner at the tavern and 
going to the play. When it was time to call for the reck- 
oning, William dropped a guinea. He and his brother 
searched for it in vain and came to the conclusion that it 
had fallen between the boards of the uncarpeted floor. 

" This is a bad job," said William, " we must give up 
the play." 

" Stop a bit," said John, " I know a trick worth two of 
that," and called the waitress. 

" Betty," said he, " we've dropped two guineas. See if 
you can find them." Betty went down on her hands and 
knees and found the one guinea, which had rolled under 
the fender. 

" That's a very good girl, Betty," said John, pocketing 
the coin, " and when you find the other you can keep it 
for your trouble." And the prudent brothers went with 



176 WIT AND HUMOR. 

light hearts to the play, and so eventually to the bench 
and the woolsack. 

In Dursley v. Berkeley, 6 Yes. 260, Eldon makes a nota- 
ble observation: 

Upon that occasion Lord Chief Justice De Grey, in his 
most luminous judgment, said he never liked Equity so 
well as when it was like Law. The day before, I had 
heard Lord Mansfield say he never liked Law so well as 
when it was like Equity: remarkable sayings of these 
two great men, which made a strong impression on my 
memory. 

A poor curate made a journey on foot to the residence 
of Eldon for the purpose of soliciting a vacant benefice, 
the incumbent of which had just died. Learning from 
his servant that the chancellor had gone out a short dis- 
tance on a sporting trip, the curate went in search of 
him. Coming up with a man shabbily dressed, carrying 
a gun and accompanied with a brace of dogs, the curate 
inquired of him where he could find the chancellor. The 
sportsman, who was the chancellor himself, replied: 

"Not far off." 

As he made this reply, he fired at a flock of pigeons, 
with no success, as usual. The curate passed on in his 
search, and soon returned to the sportsman, whose sev- 
eral unproductive shots he had witnessed, and remarked 
to him that he was not a very successful shooter; and 
added : 

"I wish you could tell me where to find Lord Eldon." 

The sportsman replied : 

" I am Lord Eldon." 

The poor curate felt greatly embarrassed, and, in a 
stammering manner, made known his business. He was 
told by the chancellor that he never attended to such 



BENCH AND BAR. 177 

business during his seasons of recreation, and that the 
journey had been a failure. The disappointed curate re- 
turned home, where he found a letter from the chancel- 
lor, giving him the preferment. After telling this story, 
Elclon said with a waggish smile: 

" See the ingratitude of mankind ! It was not long 
before a large present of game reached me, with a letter 
from my new-made rector, purporting that he had sent 
it to me ; because, from what he had seen of my shooting, 
he supposed I must be badly off for game." 

Eldon was noted for his indecision, many of his judg- 
ments being apparently influenced by the last arguments 
which he heard. Sir George Eose, alluding to this char- 
acteristic weakness of the chancellor, wrote: 

"Mr. Leach 
Made a speech, 
Pithy, clear and strong. 

Mr. Hart, 

On the other part, 

Was prosy, dull and long; 

Mr. Parker 

Made that darker, 

Which was dark enough without; 

Mr. Bell 

Spoke so well, 

That the chancellor said, 'I doubt.'" 

One evening John Scott (Lord Eldon) had been dip- 
ping rather too freely in the convivial bowl with a friend 
in Queen street, and, on emerging into the open air, his 
intellect became to a considerable extent confused; and 
not being able to distinguish objects with any degree of 
minuteness or certainty, he thought himself in a fair way 
of losing the road to his own house in Picardy Place. In 
this perplexity he espied someone coming towards him, 

12 



178 WIT AND HUMOR. 

whom he stopped with this query: "D'ye ken whaur 
John Scott bides ? " 

" What's the use o' your speerin' that question ? " said 
the man. " You're John Scott yoursel'." 

"I ken that," said John; "but it's no himseP that's 
wanted — it's his house." 

Ellenborough, Lord.— On one occasion Ellenbor- 
ough was under the necessity of listening to an advocate 
who had the reputation of being a sound lawyer but a 
terrible bore. The question before the court was the 
ratability of certain lime quarries for relief of the poor. 
Counsel contended, at a wearisome length, that such prop- 
erty was not ratable, because the limestone in the quarries 
could be reached only by deep boring, which was a mat- 
ter of science. 

"Well," interrupted his lordship, "you will hardly suc- 
ceed in convincing us, sir, that every species of boring is 
a matter of science." 

To the surgeon in the witness-box who said : " I employ 
myself as a surgeon," Ellenborough retorted, "But does 
anyone else employ you as a surgeon ? " 

A Westminster volunteer corps, whilst exercising in 
Tothill Fields, being overtaken by a violent storm of wind 
and rain, took shelter in Westminster Hall while Ellen- 
borough was presiding in the Court of King's Bench. 
Ellenborough said: "What is the meaning of that dis- 
turbance ? " " My lord," said the usher, " it is a volunteer 
regiment exercising." "Exercising ! " said Ellenborough, 
" we will see who is best at that. Go to the regiment and 
inform it that if it depart not instantly, I will give it into 
the custody of a tipstaff." 

When Handle Jackson, who despised technicalities, and 
relied on his eloquence, began his argument, " In the book 



BENCH AND BAR. 179 

of Nature it is written," — Ellenborough broke in, "Be 
good enough, sir, to mention the page from which you 
are about to quote." 

To Mr. Preston, the famous conveyancer, who in argu- 
ing a case had not exhausted the " Year-Books " by even- 
ing, and applied to know when it would be their lordships' 
pleasure to hear the remainder of his argument, Ellen- 
borough replied: 

" Mr. Preston, we are bound to hear you, and I hope 
we shall do so on Friday; but, alas! pleasure has been 
long out of the question." 

Another tiresome conveyancer, having, toward the end 
of Easter Term, occupied the court an entire day about 
the merger of a term, the chief justice said to him: 

" I am afraid, sir, the term, although a long one, will 
merge in your argument." 

When told that the penurious Lord Kenyon was dying, 
Ellenborough asked, " Dying ? what will he get by that ? " 

An impudent young member of the bar, addressing the 
court in a criminal case, began: 

"My unfortunate client" — and repeating it two or 
three times, stopped short. 

" Go on, sir, go on," said Ellenborough, " so far, the 
court is with you." 

Lord Westmoreland was in the House of Lords, and, 
in giving his opinion on the question in debate, said : 

" My lords, at this point I asked myself a question." 
Lord Ellenborough, in a loud aside: "And a stupid an- 
swer you'll be sure to get to it." 

Eloquence, Tangled. — Bright skeins of tangled 
eloquence may be gathered from addresses to court and 
jury. A scholarly advocate, with a defective memory, 



180 WIT AND HUMOR. 

electrified his listeners with the following eloquent ap> 
peal: "Gentlemen of the jury, it is better that ninety- 
nine innocent men should escape than one guilty man 
should be punished. A — I mean that it is better that 
ninety-nine guilty men should be punished than that one 
innocent man should escape. Well, gentlemen, you read 
your Bibles and know what I mean." 

Mr. Benedict, of New York, in arguing the Weismiller 
case, referred to the great mass of testimony contained 
in the printed case, and said : 

" There are a great many important questions of fact 
in this case. It would be impossible to make your honors 
understand them all; and for that reason, also, we ask 
that the nonsuit be set aside, and that the case be sub- 
mitted to the judgment of twelve intelligent men." 

" Gentlemen of the jury," said an Australian lawyer, 
"the case for the crown is a mere skeleton — a mere 
skeleton, gentlemen; for, as I shall presently show you, it 
has neither flesh, blood nor bones in it." 

A western attorney eloquently said, " Your honor sits 
high upon the adorable seat of justice, like the rock of 
Gibraltar; while the eternal streams of justice, like the 
cadaverous clouds of the valley, flow meandering at your 
feet." 

" Gentlemen of the jury," said a Scotch barrister, " hav- 
ing shown to you that the case made for the plaintiff is 
absolutely impossible, I shall now proceed to prove to 
you that it is in the highest degree improbable." 

In the case of Tucker v. Ely, tried before the late 
Judge Morgan of New York, Mr. Maxon, in closing to 
the jury, said : 

" The plaintiff and the defendant are both lawyers; all 



BENCH AND BAR. 181 

the witnesses who have been sworn in the case are law- 
yers; the counsel of coarse are lawyers; in fact, every 
one in any way connected with the case is a respectable 
member of the bar of this county, with the single excep- 
tion of his honor on the bench." 

"Gentlemen of the jury," said an Irish barrister, " it 
will be for you to say whether this defendant shall be 
allowed to come into court with unblushing footsteps, 
with the cloak of hypocrisy in his mouth, and draw three 
bullocks out of my client's pocket with impunity." 

A New Jersey lawyer, in addressing the court, was 
somewhat twisted in his remarks: 

" Your honors do not sit there like marble statues to 
be wafted about by every idle breeze." 

Sir Bryan O'Loghlen, of Yictoria, perpetrated a de- 
lightful bull when he gravely told the Supreme Court: 

"A verbal agreement is not worth the paper it's writ- 
ten on." 

An Irish barrister, defending a prisoner in Limerick, 
said: 

"Gentlemen of the jury, think of his poor mother — 
his only mother." 

" Gentlemen of the jury," said a backwoods attorney 
in the last meshes of tangled eloquence, " you sit in that 
box as the great reservoir of Koman liberty, Spartan 
fame and Grecian polytheism. You are to swing the 
great flail of justice and electricity over this immense 
community in hydraulic majesty and in conjugal super- 
fluity. You are to ascend the deep arcana of nature and 
dispose of my client with equiponderating concatenation 
and reverberating momentum. Such, gentlemen, is your 
sedative and stimulating character; my client is only a 



182 WIT AND HUMOR. 

man with domestic eccentricities and matrimonial con- 
figuration, not permitted, as you are, gentlemen, to bask 
in the primeval and lowest vales of society; he has to 
endure the red-hot sun of the universe, seated on the 
heights of nobility and feudal eminence ! He has a wife 
of matrimonial propensities that henpecks the remainder 
of his days with soothing and bewitching verbosity. He 
has a family of domestic children that gather around 
the fireside of his peaceful domicile in tumultuous con- 
sanguinity and cry with screaming and reverberating 
momentum for bread, butter and molasses. Such, gen- 
tlemen, is the glowing and overwhelming character and 
defearance of my client, who stands here indicted by this 
persecuting pettifogger of this court, who is as much in- 
ferior to me as 1 am exterior to the judge, and you, gen- 
tlemen of the jury. This borax of the law has brought 
witnesses into this court, who swore my client stole a 
firkin of butter; but I say they swore to a lie, every one 
of them, and the truth is concentrated within them, and 
I will prove it by a learned expectoration of the prin- 
ciples of law. 

" Now, butter is made of grass, and it is laid down in St. 
Peter Pindar in his principles of subterraneous law, pages 
18 to 27, inclusive, that grass is couchant and levant, 
which 'means, in our obicular tongue, that grass is of a 
mild and free nature, and therefore you see that my client 
had a right to grass and butter both. Again, butter is 
made of grease, and Greece is a foreign country situated 
in the far-off and emaciated country of Liberia and Cali- 
fornia, and therefore my client is out of the benediction 
of this court and cannot be tried in this horizon. 

" I will now bring forward the ultimantum respondenti 
and cap the great climax of logic by quoting an incon- 
ceivable maxim of law laid down in Latin in Hannibal, 



BENCH AND BAR. 183 

Hudibras, Blackstone and Sangrado. It is this : hecJc, hock r 
morus, multicalus, emensa et thoro guta lega sentum; which' 
means in English, that ninety-nine men are guilty where 
one is innocent. It is therefore your duty, gentlemen, to 
convict ninety-nine men first, then you come to my client, 
who is innocent, and acquit according to the law. 

" If these great principles shall be duly appreciated by 
this court, then the great north pole of liberty that has 
stood so many years in pneumatic tallness shall continue 
to stand the wreck of the Indian invasion, the pirates of 
the Hypoborian seas, and the marauders of the Aurora 
Boliver. But, gentlemen, if you convict my client, his 
children will be obliged to pine away in a state of hope- 
less matrimony, and his beautiful wife will stand alone 
and deserted like a dried-up mullen stalk in a sheep pas- 
ture." 

In an address to a jury, Mr. Carson, Q. C, used this 
expressive language: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, the charges against my clients 
are only mare's nests which have been traced to their 
birth, and are found to have had neither origin nor ex- 
istence." 

In another case counsel said, " My client acted boldly. 
He saw the storm brewing in the distance; but he was 
not dismayed. He took the bull by the horns, and had 
him indicted for perjury." 

Epigram. — Counselor Garrow, during his cross-exam- 
ination of a prevaricating elderly female, by whom it 
was essential to prove that a tender of money had been 
made, had a scrap of paper thrown him by the opposite 
counsel, on which was written : 

"Garrow, submit; that tough old jade 
Can never prove a tender made." 



184 WIT AND HUMOR. 

After going to law: 

This law, they say, great nature's chain connects, 
That causes ever must produce effects. 
In me behold reversed great nature's laws — 
All my effects lost by a single cause. 

In indenture or deed, 
Tho' a thousand you read, 

Neither comma nor colon you'll ken; 
A stop intervening, 
Might determine the meaning, 

And what would the lawyers do then ? 

— Samuel Bishop. 

Lord Erskine, on the removal of a distinguished coun- 
selor from a house in Red Lion Square, and an iron-mon- 
ger becoming its occupant, wrote : 

This house, where once a lawyer dwelt, 

Is now a smith's. Alas ! 
How rapidly the iron age 

Succeeds the age of brass ! 

Some one versified a joke of Jekyll's as follows: 

" Sergeant Raine was one day 

The counsel for Hay, 
In a cause that for Appleby stood, 

Quoth Jekyll the wit, 

' I have never heard yet 
Of the rain that did hay any good.' n 

The English rule of the road — to the left: 

"The rule of the road is a paradox quite 
Both in riding and driving along; 
If you go to the left you are sure to go right, 
If you go the right you go wrong; 

But in walking the streets, 'tis a different case, 
To the right it is right you should bear; 

To the left should be left quite enough of free space 
For the persons you chance to meet there." 

The judge who said to a diminutive counselor, " Sir, 
when a barrister addresses the court he must stand," on 



BENCH AND BAR. 185 

receiving the reply, " I am standing on the bench, my 
lord," apologized, and immediately told another barrister 
of considerable height to sit down, only to receive the 
meek but overwhelming answer, " I am sitting down, my 
lord." This story appears in an epigram: 

" Mahaff ey and Collis, ill-paired in a case, 
Representatives true of the rattling size ace; 
To the heights of the law, though, I hope you will rise, 
You will never be judges, I'm sure, of a(s)size." 

The following epigram refers to a worthy but tedious 
sergeant, given to making long speeches. He had a rubi- 
cund countenance, and in the full-dress costume of the 
•court of his day was a notable figure : 

The sergeant pleads with face on fire, 

And all the court may rue it; 
His purple garments come from Tyre; 

His arguments go to it. 

An interesting case on the law of strikes: 

A mechanic his labor will often discard 

If the rate of his pay he dislikes; 
But a clock — and its case is uncommonly hard — 

Will continue to work though it strikes. 

— Thomas Hood. 

The following playful verses were written by Sir George 
Rose and James Smith, in allusion to Craven Street, 
•Strand, where the latter resides: 

At the top of my street the attorneys abound, 
And down at the bottom the barges are found: 
Fly, Honesty, fly to some safer retreat, 
For there's craft in the river, and craft in the street. 

— James Smith. 

Why should Honesty fly to some safer retreat, 
From attorneys and barges, od rot 'em ? 

For the lawyers are just at the top of the street, 
And the barges are just at the bottom. 

— Sir George Rose, 



186 WIT AND HUMOR. 

On a famous water-suit : 

My wonder is really boundless, 
That among the queer cases we try, 

A land-case should often be groundless, 
And a water-case always be dry! — Saxe. 

Epitaph. — The poet Moore composed the following 
epitaph on a Dublin lawyer who left an unsavory repu- 
tation behind him: 

" Here lies John Shaw, 
. Attoruey-at-law; 
And when he died, 
The devil cried — 
' Give me your paw, 
John Shaw, — 
Limb of the law.' " 

Ben Jonson was going through a church in Surrey,, 
and, seeing some poor people weeping over a grave, asked 
one of the women why they wept : 

"We have lost our precious lawyer, Justice Bandall," 
was the reply; "he was always so good — the best man 
ever lived — he kept us from going to law." 

" Well," said Jonson, " I will send you an epitaph to- 

write upon his tomb : " 

" God works wonders now and then. 
Here lies a lawyer, an honest man." 

Epitaph on Sir John Strange, the reporter: 

Here lies an honest lawyer, and that is Strange. 

Lord Westbury despised the dogma of future punish- 
ment, and endeavored on one occasion to discuss the sub- 
ject with Bishop Wilberforce. The bishop bluntly replied : 
" I really must decline to discuss the question because you 
are an interested party." This story of dogma naturally 
leads to an opinion delivered by Westbury in 1864, which 



BENCH AND BAR. 187 

zed a humorist to propose the following epitaph to his 
memory : 

" Richard Baron Westbury, Lord High Chancellor of 
England. He was a distinguished judge and an eminent 
Christian, and a still more distinguished statesman. Dur- 
ing his tenure of office he abolished the ancient method 
of conveying land, the time-honored institution of the In- 
solvency Court, and the eternity of punishment. Toward 
the close of his earthly career, he dismissed Hades with 
costs, and took away from the orthodox members of the' 
Church of England their last hope of eternal damnation. n 

Samuel Heywood, an eminent sergeant in the early 
part of this century, was extensively employed on the 
Northern English Circuit, riding on the circuit a famous 
horse, called Pleader, upon whose death the witty Jekyll 
wrote On Pleader's Tomb: 

Here lies a Pleader who ne'er urged a plea, 

A Circuiteer who never took a fee. 

From Court to Court to serve his friends he'd go, 

And though a mute, a firm support bestow; 

Through thick and thin he'd surely keep his way, 

Carry his client safe, and win the day. 

Press'd ever so by law, his course was straight, 
He never sank or fell beneath its weight; 
Called to the Bar, he rose as tho' design'd 
To leave all other Barristers behind; 
And such assistance fav'ring fortune gave, 
He'd every motion he could wish to have. 

Our care it is here to support his fame, 
Report his merits and record his name. 
To tell the world a Pleader lies below, 
Who, by false steps or tricks, ne'er made a foet 

No petulant disputer, he would say 
No contradictory word, but simply neigh. 
Once on his legs, a sure and safe support, 
He'd carry jury, witnesses, and Court. 



188 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Headstone epitaph to the memory of a far- West attor- 
ney, whose last days were spent with a vigilance commit- 
tee: "Here lies John Bing: he never did anything else." 

Equity. — The constitution adopted by the state of 
North Carolina in 1868 abolished courts of equity, giving 
the superior courts jurisdiction of all matters, legal and 
equitable, and the power to determine them in the same 
suit. Shortly afterwards ex-Judge B. was employed by 
a countryman to bring suit against his own brother for a 
trivial sum. The judge advised his client to attempt to 
compromise the matter, on the ground that it was too 
trivial to bring into court, especially considering the rela- 
tionship of the parties. " Tell your brother," said the 
judge, " that he ought to consider the circumstances and 
settle, according to equity and right." 

His advice was followed cheerfully, but the country- 
man returned the next day and reported that his efforts 
to compromise had been without avail. 

"What did your brother say?" asked Judge B. 

" Why, Jedge," said his client, scratching his head, " he 
said d — n eaquity ! thar w r arnt no sich thing as eaquity 
no mo, which the new consecution clone killed eaquity 
dead as Hector ! " 

"You go back and tell your foolish brother," said 
Judge B., slowly and softly, " that when he gets into the 
court-house he will find that 'eaquity' lacks a good deal 
of being dead. Furthermore (here his voice dropped to a 
whisper), he has gone and cursed 'eaquity J and if the judge 
finds it out your brother will have to go to jail for con- 
tempt of court! Tell him that the best thing for him to 
do is to compromise, and keep away from the court-house 
for five or six years." 

The compromise went through. 



BENCH AND BAR. 189 

Erie, Lord. — A little out of the ordinary routine, and 
therefore the more enjoyable, was the reply of Lord Chief- 
Justice Erie to a member of the bar who apologized for 
a sally of wit which set the court laughing : 

" The court is very much obliged to any learned gen- 
tleman who beguiles the tedium of a legal argument with 
a little honest hilarity." 

Erie was prone to interrupt counsel when it was found 
that the judges had already made up their minds against 
him. On one occasion Mr. Boville, Q. C, was stopped 
with: "Here we stand, we four men, and we have all 
firmly (emphasizing the adverb) made up our minds that 
there must be a new trial ; but if you think it worth while 
going on after that (playfully), why of course we'll keep on 
hearing you." Whereupon the Q. C. laughingly sat down. 

On another occasion, interrupting counsel, he said: 
" I beg to inform the counsel there is a time in the 
mind of every man at which he lets down the flood-gates 
of his understanding, and allows not one more drop to 
enter, and that time in my mind has fully arrived." 

Erskine, John. — The late Judge Erskine, of Georgia, 
did not read law until he was forty-five years old, but he 
soon made his way to the front, and shortly after the 
close of the war President Johnson appointed him to the 
judgeship of the United States Court for the Northern and 
Southern Districts of Georgia. Erskine took great pleas- 
ure in relating one story which dealt with incidents in 
his early life and in his later years. When he was about 
sixteen years old he ran away from his home in Ireland. 
He joined the crew of a sailing vessel, but, as the captain 
could not make a sailor of him, he had to do the cooking, 
and was known to everybody on the ship as Johnny the 
Cook. 



190 WIT AND HUMOR. 

At the end of a year the youngster abandoned the sea 
and returned home. After completing his education he 
came to this country and settled in Georgia, where he 
was remarkably successful and prosperous. He had held 
his judgeship a year or two when he went to Savannah 
to preside over the Federal Court. One afternoon he 
strolled down to the river to look at the vessels in port. 
The captain of one of the ships came ashore and passed 
the judge, giving him a sharp glance. Evidently some- 
thing puzzled the captain, for he retraced his steps and 
stared hard at the man, who was enjoying the scene on 
the river. 

" Blowed if it isn't Johnny the Cook ! " exclaimed the 
bluff sailor. 

Erskine looked at him and recognized his old captain. 
The two shook hands heartily, and the captain told the 
other how he had identified him by a scar on his face. 

" I haven't forgotten the fight in which you were so 
badly cut," said the veteran of the seas. " You proved 
yourself a man that day, and the whole ship sided with 
you." 

A brief talk about old times followed, and then the 
captain glanced at his former cook's clothes. 

"You must have prospered in this country," he re- 
marked. " What is your line of business ? " 

" There is a long story connected with that," replied 
the judge, "and as I have to meet an appointment now, 
I must postpone it until I see you again. Meet me in 
the United States court room to-morrow morning at ten 
o'clock. Until then, good-by." 

The captain promised to be on hand. 

The next morning at ten o'clock Erskine was on the 
bench, in his black robe, dealing out justice to a crowd 
of moonshiners. In a few moments the old sea captain 



BENCH AND BAR. 191 

walked into the court room. He glanced around in a 
dazed way, and was evidently disappointed in not find- 
ing the man he sought. Finally he raised his eyes to the 
bench. For a moment he seemed bewildered. He doubted 
his own eyes. Erskine saw him, and beckoned to him to 
come inside of the railing which fenced off the lawyers 
from the spectators. 

With trembling steps the captain took his stand one 
step below the platform on which the judge sat. Erskine 
welcomed him cordially, and during some unimportant 
routine business told the astonished sailor about his career 
in America and his elevation to the bench. 

The story was told in a low tone, and not a word of it 
was heard by anybody except the captain. The latter 
was so thoroughly astonished by what he saw and heard 
that he was anxious to get away, and he seemed to be 
gratified when the judge dismissed him with an invita- 
tion to dine with him at his hotel. When the mariner 
reached the bottom step he faced about and gave the 
judge a sweeping glance. 

"•Well, I'll be blowedl" he ejaculated, in a distinctly 
audible voice. He left the court room shaking his head 
and looking back every other step. Even when he was 
outside of the building he was in the same state of bewil- 
derment. The incident afforded Judge Erskine intense 
enjoyment, and he frequently referred to it. 

Erskine, Lord. — Erskine was a theatrical speaker, 
and omitted no pains to secure theatrical effect. It was 
noticed that he never appeared within the bar until the 
cause celebre had been called, and a buzz of excitement 
and anxious expectation testified the eagerness of the as- 
sembled crowd to see and hear him. 



192 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Of Erskine as an advocate, "William Howitt says: 
Lord Erskine has been pronounced by other distin- 
guished lawyers the greatest forensic orator that England 
has ever produced, but his fiery and electric eloquence 
was not more remarkable than the warm and noble im- 
pulses of his heart. They were his humanity and pa- 
triotism, his indignation against whatever was unjust and 
oppressive, which kindled and inspired his great intellect, 
and their expression carried irresistibly the souls of his 
hearers along with him. Under the fervid outgush of 
his intense love of right, his vehement hatred of human 
wrong, the dullest hearts caught a new light and fire, and 
he drew verdicts from men who, without his communi- 
cated spirit, would have never dreamed of the sublime 
heights of truth and justice to which he carried them. 
The secret of his triumphs was the possession of a noble 
heart vivifying a quick and instinct-like intellect. He 
seemed to spring at once to the truth of the case sub- 
mitted to him, and he hurried his hearers with him al- 
most unconsciously to the same goal. It is rare to see a 
mind like Erskine's surviving all the cold cautions and 
technical sophistries of a legal education, and sacking its 
triumphs only in the triumphs of humanity; a mind un- 
seduced by royal favor or party, much less by selfish indi- 
vidual interests ; exulting in securing the victory of truth, 
even at the highest peril of self-sacrifice. Such men may 
have their weaknesses, as Erskine had his, but they have 
a strength which no merely intellectual attainments can 
bring. For this reason there is no life of any lawyer 
which I ever read with the same delight as I have read 
that of Thomas Erskine. 

Erskine, in cross-examining, could be most searching and 
severe; but he never resorted to browbeating, nor was he 



BENCH AND BAR. 193 

gratuitously rude. Often he carried his point by coax- 
ing; and when the evidence could not be contradicted, he 
would try by pleasantry to lessen the effect of it. He 
was counsel once for the plaintiff in an action for a tailor's 
bill, the defence being that the clothes were very ill-made, 
and particularly that the two sleeves of a dress-coat were 
of unequal length. The defendant's witness accordingly 
swore that " one of them was longer than the other," upon 
which Erskine thus began: " Now, sir, will you swear 
that one of them was not shorter than the other?" The 
witness negativing this proposition, after an amusing re- 
ply, the plaintiff had the verdict. 

In the Thelwall case, the prisoner, becoming alarmed, 
wrote upon a slip of paper: " I'm afraid I'll be hanged if 
I don't plead my own case," and handed it to Erskine,. 
his counsel, who replied: "You'll be hanged if you do."" 

Erskine was an incorrigible punster. He believed that 
nothing can make a dull thinker witty, no amount of 
brain cudgeling; and that it is not from every stick you 
can get the mercury of a happy punster. A gentleman 
once said to him that " punning is the lowest form of 
wit." " It is," answered Erskine, " and therefore the 
foundation of all wit." 

A junior barrister, joining the circuit, had the misfor- 
tune to have his trunk cut off from the back of his post- 
chaise, on which Erskine comforted him by saying: 
"Young gentleman, henceforth imitate the elephant, the 
wisest of animals, who always carries his trunk before him." 

Having become the owner of a Sussex estate, on which 
grew nothing but birch trees, Erskine had the trees cut 
down and manufactured into brooms. One of his broom- 
sellers having been arrested and brought before a magis- 

13 



194: WIT AND HUMOR 

trate for having no license, Erskine undertook his defence^ 
and stated that there was a clause to meet the very case. 

"What is it?" asked the magistrate. 

" The sweeping clause, your worship, which is further 
fortified by the proviso that ' nothing herein contained 
shall prevent any proprietor of land from vending the 
produce thereof in any manner that to him shall seem 
fit.' " 

Erskine, receiving his appointment to succeed Dundas 
as justiciary in Scotland, observed that he must go and 
order his silk robe. 

"Never mind," said Dundas, "for the short time you 
will require it, you had better borrow mine." 

" No," retorted Erskine, " no matter how short a time 
I may need it, Heaven forbid that I should begin my 
career by adopting the abandoned habits of my predeces- 
sor." 

The noted British advocate, Mingay, speaking for a de- 
fendant who was sued for the price of keeping a horse, 
and defended on the ground that the fodder was of poor 
quality, said to the jury: 

" Gentlemen, the oats and hay were unfit to eat, and 
naturally the horse demurred." 

"He should have gone to the country," was Erskine's 
reply. 

Sometimes Erskine's treatment of witnesses was very 
jocular, and sometimes very unfair; but his unfairness 
was redeemed by such delicacy of wit and courtesy of 
manner that his most malicious jeux d ' esprit seldom an- 
gered the witnesses at whom they were aimed. A re- 
ligious enthusiast objecting to be sworn in the usual 
manner, but stating that though he would not "kiss the 
book," he w T ould " hold up his hand " and swear, Erskine 



BENCH AND BAR. 195 

asked him to give his reason for preferring so eccentric a 
way to the ordinary mode of giving testimony. 

" It is written in the book of Revelations," answered 
the man, " that the angel standing on the sea held up his 
hand." 

" But that does not apply to your case," urged the ad- 
vocate ; " for in the first place you are no angel ; secondly, 
you cannot tell how the angel would have sworn if he 
had stood on dry ground, as you do." 

Less fair was Erskine's treatment of the commercial 
traveler who appeared in the witness-box dressed in the 
height of fashion, and wearing a starched white necktie 
folded with the " Brummel /old." In an instant reading 
the character of the man, on whom he had never before 
set eyes, and knowing how necessary it was to put him in 
a state of extreme agitation and confusion before touch- 
ing on the facts concerning which he had come to give 
evidence, Erskine rose, surveyed the coxcomb, and said, 
with an air of careless amusement : 

"You were born and bred in Manchester, I perceive." 
Greatly astonished at this opening remark, the man an- 
swered nervously: 

"A Manchester man — born and bred in Manchester." 
" Exactly," observed Erskine, in a conversational tone, 
and as though he were imparting information to a per- 
sonal friend ; " I knew it from the absurd tie of your neck- 
sloth." 

Erskine, speaking of animals, and hesitating to call 
them brutes, hit upon that happy phrase — the mute crea- 
tion. 

Crossing Hampstead Heath, Erskine saw a ruffianly 
driver most unmercifully pommeling a miserable, bare- 
boned pack-horse, and, remonstrating with him, received 



196 WIT AND HUMOR. 

this answer: "Why, it's my own; mayn't I use it as 1 
please?" As the fellow spoke, he discharged a fresh 
shower of blows on the beast's raw back. Erskine, much 
irritated by this brutality, laid two or three sharp strokes 
of his walking-stick over the shoulders of the cowardly 
offender, who, crouching and grumbling, asked him what 
business he had to touch him with his stick. "Why," 
replied Erskine, " my stick is my own ; mayn't I use it as 
I please ? " 

Counselor Lamb, an old man of a nervous temperament, 
was wont to begin his pleadings by drawing attention to 
his own timidity. On one occasion, when opposed to 
Erskine, he happened to remark that he felt himself grow- 
ing more and more timid as he grew older. 

" No wonder," replied the witty but relentless barrister, 
"every one knows that the older a lamb grows, the more 
sheepish it becomes." 

In his defense of the liberty of the press, and the rights 
of the subject when assailed by the doctrine of constructive 
treason, Erskine had some of the severest conflicts with 
the court which any advocate was ever called to main- 
tain. When the jury in the case of the Dean of St. Asaph 
brought in their verdict, "guilty of publishing only" 
which would have the effect of clearing the defendant, 
Justice Buller, who presided, acting on the principle held 
by the court, considered it beyond their province to make 
this addition, and determined they should withdraw it. 
Erskine, on the other hand, seized upon the word the mo- 
ment it was uttered, and demanded to have it recorded. 
After some sparring between him and the court, he put 
the question to the foreman: 

" Is the word only to stand as a part of your verdict ? " 

"Certainly," was the reply. 






BENCH AND BAR. 197 

" Then I insist it shall be recorded," said Erskine. 

"The verdict must be misunderstood," replied the 
judge. 

" The jury," replied Erskine, "do understand their ver- 
dict." 

" Sir, I will not be interrupted," retorted his lordship 
angrily. 

" I stand here," said Erskine, " as an advocate for a 
brother citizen, and I desire the word only may be re- 
corded." 

At this Buller exclaimed: " Sit down, sir; remember 
your duty, or I shall be obliged to proceed in another 
manner." 

Quick as a flash Erskine replied: 

"Your lordship may proceed in what manner you 
think fit ; I know my duty as well as your lordship knows 
yours; I shall not alter my conduct." 

The spirit of the judge sank before the firmness of the 
advocate ; no attempt was made to carry the threat into 
execution. 

Shortly after the death of Mr. John Wright, a talented 
but unsuccessful advocate, Sheriff Anstruther remarked 
to Erskine: 

" Poor Wright is dead. He has died very poor. It is 
said he has left no effects." 

" That is not wonderful," replied the humorist; " as he 
had no causes he could have no effects." 

Dr. Parr said to Erskine at one of their social meet- 
ings: 

" Erskine, I mean to write your epitaph when you die." 
"Doctor, it is almost a temptation to commit suicide." 

" That which is called firmness in a king," said Erskine, 
" is called obstinacy in a donkey." 



198 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Evarts, William M.— Through the sober, serious 
side of Evarts' wonderful career at the bar a gleaming 
thread of gayety runs. No one enjoyed a good story 
more than he, and few told a better one. A member of 
the New York bar says: 

"I believe his choicest mot was uttered at a dinner 
given several years ago in New York to Thomas Bayley 
Potter, a member of the English House of Commons. 
The Rev. Henry Potter was the host, while among the 
guests were a number of other well-known members of 
the Potter family. "When it came Evarts' turn formally 
to speak, he began about in this way : 

" When I remember that we are being entertained by 
the Rev. Henry — Potter; that we were invited to meet 
Sir Thomas Bayley — Potter ; when I observe at my right 
Clarkson N. — Potter, and at my left the Rev. Eliphalet 
Nott — Potter, I am reminded of the young country cler- 
gyman who was unexpectedly summoned to supply a 
city pulpit. The church was so imposing and the con- 
gregation so fashionable that when he arose to make the 
opening invocation he found himself a good deal flus- 
trated. The result was that to the consternation of his 
hearers he led off with the petition : ' O Lord, help us 
never to forget that Thou art the clay and that we are 
the potters.' " 

At a New England Society dinner, Mark Twain had 
just finished a piquant address, when Evarts arose, shoved 
both of his hands down into his trousers pockets, as was 
his habit, and laughingly remarked: 

" Doesn't it strike this ompany as a little unusual that 
a professional humorist should be funny ? " 

Mark Twain waited until the laughter excited by this 
sally had subsided, and then drawled out: 

" Doesn't it strike this company as a little unusual that 
a lawyer should have his hands in his own pockets ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 199 

One morning the elevator which carried him up to his 
office in the State Department contained an unusual num- 
ber of strangers, presumably applicants for ministerships 
or consulships. Turning to a friend who accompanied 
him, Evarts whispered: 

" This is the largest collection for foreign missions that 
I've seen taken up for some time." 

At a reception in Washington City, he was drawn into 
a discussion between two ladies. 

"Mr. Evarts," said one, "do you not think I am right 
in saying that a woman is always the best judge of an- 
other woman's character ? " 

"Madam," replied Evarts, "she is not only the best 
judge, but also the best executioner." 

Lord Coleridge was at Mount Vernon with Evarts, and, 
talking about Washington, said: 

" I have heard that he was a very strong man physically, 
and, standing on the lawn here, coald throw a silver dol- 
lar across the river to the other bank." 

Evarts paused a moment to measure the distance with 
his eye. It seemed rather a tall story, but it was not for 
him to belittle the Father of his Country in the eyes of a 
foreigner. 

" Don't you believe it ? " asked Coleridge. 

" Yes," Evarts replied. " I think it's very likely true. 
You know a dollar would go farther in those days than 
it does now." 

A gentleman who listened to his argument in a case be- 
fore the Court of Appeals observed: "It takes a good 
deal to make that dignified court of last resort indulge 
in a smile, but Mr. Evarts did it. He was pitted against 
some great corporation, and in order to illustrate the 
quality of its magnanimity, he said : ' Why, if the court 



200 WIT AND HUMOR. 

please, when I think of the attitude taken by this road, 
I am reminded of the anecdote of the Irish bailiff who 
wrote to the proprietor of the estate, who was traveling 
on the Continent: ' The tenantry are behaving very badly, 
and have gone so far as to threaten to shoot me in case 
the rents are not reduced.' And in answer to the bailiff 
the landlord promptly wrote: 'Tell the tenants that the 
rents will not be reduced, and impress it upon them that 
no threats which they may make to shoot you will have 
the slightest influence upon me. 9 " 

Evarts for years sent a half barrel of pork every year 
to Bancroft, the historian, with a characteristic note. ~No 
one ever read these notes but Bancroft. When the his- 
torian died, these two notes from Evarts were found: 

" Dear Bancroft; If your history of America ever be- 
comes as successful as ' Carlyle's History of the French 
Eevolution,' it will be largely attributable to my pen. 

"Evarts." 

" Dear Bancroft: I send you two products of my pen 
to-day — my usual half-barrel of pork and my eulogy on 
Chief Justice Chase. Evarts." 

Evarts has been an invalid several years, and, though 
but a shadow of his former self, still retains much of his 
quaint, dry humor. JSTot long ago, while being dressed, 
he looked at his emaciated frame and remarked quietly: 

" Just about one-half of myself. I wonder if the other 
half presents such a sorry appearance." 

Examination — For Admission to the Bar. — 

F. C. Burnand, a popular English humorist, was admitted 
to the bar in 1862. The story of his examination for ad- 
mission is delightfully told: 
* It was decided that I should go to the bar. The en- 



BENCH AND BAR. 201 

trance being obtained by either passing an examination, 
or attending a course of lectures, I chose the latter, hav r 
ing lost confidence in myself from experience in the 
former method. I had nearly completed the appointed 
number, when I made a mistake in the day. This I ex- 
plained to the lecturer, and it was overlooked. But in 
the following week for the first time I mistook the hour, 
and arrived when the door was shut, the last lecture 
given, and the professor gone into the country for his 
vacation. 

A friend said " Oh, go in for the Exam. Easy as pos- 
sible." 

I suggested that there were legal difficulties which 
would pose me. His answer was confidently, " Not a 
bit. All law is founded upon the principles of common 
sense. Reduce any apparent legal difficulty to first prin- 
ciples, and there you are." I subsequently tried this, and 
certainly there I was, but didn't get any farther. " But 
technical terms one must get up," I objected. He was 
quite indignant. 

" Technical terms," he replied, " can be mastered in a 
week's reading." 

His theory was that hardly any lawyers know any- 
thing of law; that the men who get on best know the 
least ; which is, to the beginner, encouraging as a theory, 
but fails when reduced to practice, or, more strictly 
speaking, when you, as a barrister, are reduced to no 
practice. However, what man dared I dared, and in I 
went. I read my paper through carefully; it didn't seem 
to contain much law that I was acquainted with ; but, re- 
membering my friend's advice about " first principles " 
and " common sense," I settled down to one question. It 
was this : 

"Why is notice of a prior incumbrance, etc., which 



202 WI T AND HUMOR. 

ought to be, but is not, registered in a county registry,, 
effectual to preserve priority ? " 

I tried to reduce this to principles of common sense. 
After much thought it struck me that perhaps if I com- 
menced the answer on paper it would come right of itself 
somehow. So I began slowly on a large sheet and with 
a big "B" up in one corner: "Because " yes, ex- 
actly, because why f It looked like the answer to a riddle. 
I glanced round at my neighbors; they were all scrib- 
bling away at various rates, heads down, well at their 
work. The examiner had his eye on me, so I made a 
feint to be thinking deeply, and scratched out " Because ** 
slowly, and then wrote it again, in a different character, 
on another sheet of paper. After a few minutes I found 
that I had only been sketching fancy portraits of little 
examiners with big heads all about the page, with an oc- 
casional reminiscence of the lineaments of Buller, Fobbes 
& Grumbury. This I felt wouldn't pass me, so I made a 
bold jump to number seven, in consequence of recogniz- 
ing the word " mortgage." 

" No. YII. Why is a person taking a mortgage of prop- 
erty, and knowing that it was subject to an equitable 
mortgage, postponed to the latter ? " 

It was necessary to write something, so I commenced 
by saying that "By the word 'mortgage ' we must under- 
stand " This I scratched out, and on reconsideration 

began again thus: " To enter into this subject as fully as 
it deserves, we must reduce the technical question to the 
first principles of common sense." There I stopped. It 
was no good. An attempt to hit off an original defini- 
tion of " Constructive Fraud " was also, I have reason to 
believe, a failure. 

As an example of constructive fraud, I ventured upon 
the instance of a builder who had undertaken to erect a 



BENCH AND BAR. 203 

habitable and solid house and who had " scamped " his 
work. I have since ascertained that this is not what the 
examiners meant by " Constructive Fraud." 

A short, pointed question, evidently framed by a brisk 
examiner, caught my eye. "No. X. What is replevin?" 
I did not like to reply on paper that it was made up of 
the words "Be " and "plevin" which was the only answer 
that suggested itself to me after looking at it for five 
minutes; so I put this on one side, and, like a Mazeppa 
among the examination questions, again I urged on my 
wild career. 

Page 3. On the second paper: Criminal Law. "If a 
prisoner has received judgment, and the sentence be after- 
ward reversed by a court of error, can he be again in- 
dicted for the same offence ? " 

Here I was at home at last. " No," I wrote boldly. 
" He could not be indicted for the same offence, because " — 
now came an opportunity for a specimen of my style; 
the examiners could judge from this what an acquisition 
I should be to the bar as an advocate, — " because it is the 
glorious privilege of a native Englishman, of one whose 
birthright is to call himself free and never to know slav- 
ery," — this was, I felt, a too-evident paraphrase on the 
chorus of "Rule, Britannia;" but it looked well, and 
would succeed admirably if declaimed — "to be charged 
only once with the same offence ; and being convicted, or 
unconvicted, it mattered not, he could never, never," — ■ 
" Rule, Britannia " again ! I ought to have given my atten- 
tion to maritime law — " be again placed at the bar before 
twelve of his fellow-countrymen, ready to take his stand 
for the offence once committed, and " — here I felt I was 
getting weak, and might lapse into unconscious verbiage, 
so pulled up with — " in fact it was totally against the 
principles of English law and English common sense, on 



204 WIT AND HUMOR. 

which all law was founded," — this came in well — "to 
try a man twice for only one offence." After this effort 
I paused. "What was the next question? The next was 
a pendant to the former, and ran thus: 

" Give the reason for your answer" 

This took me aback. It involved reading my answer 
over again. I could see no reason for it. The more I 
thought of it the less reason I could see. In fact the 
whole case came gradually to assume a totally different 
complexion. Why shouldn't a man be tried twice if he 
deserved it, or could be caught again ? " Caught again ! " 
That suggested a new train of thought. Perhaps the 
question turned upon this supposition. Yet, if so, it was 
absurdly like the receipt attributed to Glasse in her cook- 
ery book, of " First catch your hare," and I couldn't very 
well write that down, as it might look like impertinence 
towards the examiner or benchers, or whoever they were 
who had to read these papers. " Give the reason for your 
answer" No, I could not see any. There was no reason 
for it, except that I " didn't know any other." I'd leave 
it, and pretend I hadn't seen it. 

Here was a simple one, almost pretty in its simplicity : 
"What constitutes the crime of larceny?" 

" Taking a pocket-handkerchief " w^as the first answer 
that arose to my lips. But why only a pocket-handker- 
chief ? That wouldn't do. " To take anything P That 
sounded like an invitation to luncheon — Would I take 
anything ? Ton my word, I say to myself, one ought to 
know what larceny is. It was mere quibbling to say it 
was theft. No. The viva voce portion commenced. 

" Could I," I was asked, " state some cases in which an 
indictment would lie for words spoken ? " 

Could I ? No, I couldn't, but I would try. "An in- 
dictment would lie," I began, sticking closely to the form 



BENCH AND BAR. 205 

of the question, " for words spoken when," — here I con- 
sidered. The examiner waited. He didn't suggest any- 
thing, so I began again — "words spoken, — that is, — in 
words spoken, an indictment would lie" — a sudden in- 
spiration. I had mistaken the sense of the word lie. I 
had it, and finished brilliantly, "An indictment, in fact, 
would lie, if it said, for instance, that such and such 
words " — I lengthened it out on purpose to give a legal 
tone to my explanation — "said to have been spoken had 
not been spoken." The examiner looked up and asked me 
if I had understood his question. On my replying per- 
fectly, he thanked me, and told me I might go. He had 
had enough of me. But I was beginning to take rather 
a fancy to him. I should like to have engaged him in 
general conversation. We should have understood one 
another then. He made a note of my name, and it was 
intimated to me the next morning that further attendance 
on my part in Lincoln's Inn Hall would, for the present, 
be dispensed with. 

I subsequently ascertained that, in addition to giving 
this inspired answer, I had sent up my papers with my 
only answer mixed by mistake with two sheets full of 
grotesque examiners, admirably drawn by me with large 
heads and little legs. This was my mistake at Lincoln's 
Inn. Subsequently I completed my attendance on the 
lectures and at the dinners, was called to the bar, sat down 
by mistake (on that occasion) next to one of the judges of 
the land at the benchers' table, and was politely removed 
by the butler. 

" I was admitted to the bar in California," said the 
Hon. Thomas B. Keed, of Maine, to a friend, "and 
Judge "Wallace examined me. The great question of the 
hour was the legal-tender act. Everybody was discussing 
its constitutionality. Some said it was constitutional; 



206 WIT AND HUMOR 

others said it was unconstitutional. The first question 
Judge Wallace asked me was: 

" ' Is the legal-tender act constitutional or unconstitu- 
tional?"' 

" I didn't hesitate a minute. I said simply: ' It is un- 
constitutional.' " 

"You can pass," said the judge. "We always pass a 
man who can settle great constitutional questions off- 
hand." 

Governor Mattacks of Vermont, at one time chairman 
of the committee to examine candidates for admission to 
the bar of Caledonia county, reported that one of the 
candidates had failed to pass the examination, having 
answered correctly but one question. 

"And what was that?" asked the judge. 

"I asked him, 'What is a fee-simple estate;' and he 
said he didn't know." 

An examination passed by a student for admission to 
the bar occurred in one of the counties in Oklahoma. 
The applicant presented himself and the judge appointed 
a committee of three to examine him, with the following- 
result: 

Q. "What is meant by consideration in a contract?" 

A. " That is when the parties take time to consider." 

Q. " What is the difference between a general issue and 
a special issue?" 

A. " A special issue is when one of the parties to an 
action denies all of the material facts, and the general 
issue is when both parties do." 

Q. "What is equity?" 

A. " I don't use any of that in my practice." 

Q. " What is chancery practice ? " 

A. " Practice before a jury." 



BENCH AND BAR 207 

Q. "Who is the master of chancery?" 

A. " The foreman." 

Q. " When is a plea in abatement used?" 

A. " When you want to get rid of a nuisance." 

Q. "What is a demurrer?" 

A. " That is when a lawyer is stumped." 

Q. " What is common law? " 

A. " Common law is practice before a justice of the 
peace." 

Q. " Why must a contract be always clothed in terms 
either express or implied? " 

A. " Because Ex nudo jpacto non oritur actioP 

Law examiner : " I will state a case : Mother and daugh- 
ter occupied the same bedroom with their two little boys. 
As the children strongly resembled each other, and were 
both dressed alike, the nurses exchanged the babies, so 
that no one could tell which belonged to the mother 
and which to the daughter. How would you settle the 
point ? " 

Candidate : " Are you quite sure, Herr Professor, that 
the babies were exchanged ? " 

Examiner: " Why, didn't I tell you so ?" 

Candidate: "Well, then, change them back again." 

Young McCorkle passed the final examination for ad- 
mission to the bar with flying colors : 
" How many kinds of juries are there ? " 
" Three." 

"What are they?" 

" Grand jury, common jury, and perjury." 
"What is law?" 

" The last guess of the Supreme Court ? " 
" What is the Supreme Court ? " 
" A court of errors." 



208 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" How is the lower court reversed ? " 
" On error by the Supreme Court." 
" "What is an honest judge ? " 
" The noblest work of man " 

Some years ago a young man applied to the District 
Court of Dallas, Texas, to be examined to practice law. 
He was rather deficient in Blackstone and Greenleaf, and 
seemed to lack the requisite preparation for admission 
to the bar. The examining lawyer badgered him until 
his brow was beaded with perspiration. 

k 'Do you know what fraud is, in the judicial sense of 
the word ? " inquired the examining attorney. 

"I — hardly — think — I do," was the stammering 
reply. 

" Well, fraud exists when a man takes advantage of 
his superior knowledge to injure an ignorant person." 

" So, that's it, is it ? Then if you take advantage of 
your superior knowledge of law to ask me questions I 
can't answer, owing to my ignorance, and in consequence 
thereby I am refused a license, I will be injured, and you 
will be guilty of fraud. Won't you, Judge ? " 

The lawyer was very thoughtful for a few moments, 
and then added reflectively: 

" My young friend, I perceive you have great natural 
qualifications for the bar, and I shall recommend that a 
large, handsomely engrossed license be granted you in 
spite of your ignorance." 

Mr. Elbert Hubbard, in his charming " Little Journeys 
to the Homes of American Statesmen," relates that when 
Patrick Henry arrived at Williamsburg, Ya., he sought 
out his old friend Thomas Jefferson, afterwards President 
of the United States, because he liked him — and to save 
a tavern bill. And Henry announced that he had come 
to Williamsburg to be admitted to the bar. 



BENCH AND BAR. 209 

" How long have you studied law ? " asked Jefferson. 

" Oh, for six weeks last Tuesday," was the answer. 

Tradition has it that Jefferson advised Henry to go 
home and study at least a fortnight more before making 
his application. But Patrick declared that the way to 
learn law was to practice it. And he was duly admitted. 

Mr. Hubbard, in the same volume, tells an interesting 
story of Henry Clay. Clay, at the age of twenty, ar- 
rived at Lexington, Ky., and requested a license to prac- 
tice law. The Bar Association, consisting of about a 
dozen members, decided that no more lawyers were needed 
in Lexington. Clay demanded that he should be exam- 
ined as to fitness, and the blackberry-bush Blackstones 
sat upon him, as a coroner would say, with intent to give 
him so stiff an examination that he would be glad to 
leave the town. 

Many difficult questions had been asked and an at- 
tempt had been made to confuse and browbeat the youth,, 
when the Nestor of the Lexington bar expectorated at a 
fly ten feet away, and remarked: 

" Oh, the devil ! there is no need of tryin' to keep a boy 
like this down — he's as lit as we, or fitter ! " 

And so he was admitted. 

The late Sampson Levy, of the Philadelphia bar, was 
engaged to argue a case in New Jersey, and, presenting 
himself in the county court at Woodbury, was about to 
open the case, when the judge, with more presumption 
than learning or civility, said to him : 

"Mr. Levy, we know you personally and by reputa- 
tion, but our rules forbid any gentleman to practice in 
New Jersey unless he shall have been formally admit- 
ted." 

" I beg your pardon," said Mr. Levy, " I was not aware 
14 



210 WIT AND HUMOR. 

of it; but by way of mending tlie matter, I will ask some 
of my learned brethren here to move for my admission 
at once." 

" But before any one can move your admission, it is 
necessary that you should be examined by the court, that 
it may satisfy itself as to your competency." 

" Certainly," said Lev} 7 , " by all means; I am perfectly 
ready to submit to your rule, with one proviso that seems 
to me to be perfectly reasonable, that I shall first be al- 
lowed to examine the court, in order that I may ascertain 
whether the court is competent to examine me" 

Expert. — Baron Alderson had a profound dislike for 
scientific witnesses, especially those of the medical pro- 
fession, called upon to give an opinion upon the evidence 
they had heard in court ; and he rarely failed in propos- 
ing some question to them which eventually proved a 
floorer. At the end of a long examination of a celebrated 
medical man, called to establish the incompetency of a de- 
ceased testator to make a will, the witness unfortunately 
said that he believed " all persons were subject to tem- 
porary fits of insanity." 

" And when they are in them," asked the judge, " are 
they aware of their state ? " 

" Certainly not, my lord," was the reply ; " they believe 
all they do and say, even if nonsensical, to be perfectly 
right and proper." 

" Good Lord ! " exclaimed Alderson, " then here have 
I taken no less than thirteen pages of notes of your evi- 
dence, and, after all, you may be in a fit of temporary in- 
sanity, talking nonsense, and believing it to be true ! " 

" What are you ? " said the judge. 
"An insane expert, your honor." 

" Oh, you are ! Well, you may step down, sir. I don't 
want any crazy persons giving testimony in this court ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 211 

\ 

" I wish to ask this court," said a lawyer called as an 
expert, "if I am compelled to come into this case, in 
which I have no personal interest, and give a legal opin- 
ion for nothing ? " 

"Certainly," replied the judge, "give it for what it is 
worth." 

A question usually asked an expert witness by an Irish 
judge (the late Justice Keogh) was: 

"For whom, sir, do you appear? For the plaintiff or 
for the defendant?" 

In referring to experts, Abraham Lincoln told a story 
of James Quarles, a distinguished lawyer of Tennessee. 
Quarles, he said, was trying a case, and, after producing 
his. evidence, rested; whereupon the defense produced a 
witness who swore Quarles completely out of court and 
a verdict was rendered accordingly. After the trial one 
of his friends came to him and said: 

" Why didn't you get that fellar to swar on your side ? " 

"I didn't know anything about him," replied Quarles. 

" I might have told yer about him," said the friend, 
" for he would have swar for you jest as hard as he swar 
for the other side. That's his business. Judge, that fellar 
takes in swarrin' fer a livin'." 

The "cocksuredness" with which experts in handwrit- 
ing give their evidence was the subject of a striking re- 
buff in an Irish court some years ago. An expert having 
emphatically sworn that a document was a forgery, Mr. 
Sergeant Armstrong, a celebrated leader of the Irish bar 
in the seventies, rose to cross-examine. He looked at 
the witness for a second or two, and then asked this 
question : 

" What about the dog ? " 

The witness seemed at a loss to understand the query, 



212 WIT AND HUMOR. 

which was repeated three times by the lawyer, with ever- 
increasing loudness of tone. At last the witness said: 

" I do not understand you, sir. Pray be more explicit. 
What dog ? " 

" "What dog ? " rejoined the sergeant ; " of course I refer 
to the dog that Baron Dowse told a jury he would not 
hang on your evidence ! " 

He sat on the jury. He noted with care 
Everything that was offered in evidence there. 
He took the exhibits with caution in hand, 
And heard what the witnesses said on the stand. 

As the days passed along he felt sure he could trust 
His judgment to offer a verdict quite just; 
But his confidence straightway gave place unto doubt, 
When the experts their theories gravely brought out. 

Of anatomy now he knows much that is new; 
Of heredity's pranks: toxicology, too. 
Craniotomy's wonders he's able to trace, 
But he's wholly forgotten the facts in the case. 

Pees, Statutory. — A Minnesota justice, newly elected, 
was waited on by a long-favored, unassuming country 
swain, about to become a happy Benedict. The knot 
being tied in the most approved manner, the groom said : 

"How much do you charge, squire?" 

" Well, the law allows me a dollar and a half; you may 
pay me what you please." 

"All right. Here's fifty cents; that'll make you two 
dollars" 

A negro brought suit before a Georgia magistrate to 
recover a cow that had strayed into a farmer's pasture- 
field. The farmer failing to appear, the hearing pro- 
ceeded, and the magistrate reserved his decision until ten 
o'clock the following morning. At the appointed hour 
he ascended the split-bottomed seat of justice. Having 



BENCH AND BAR. 213 

adjusted his spectacles and arranged the Code and Form 
books in front of him, he delivered the following opinion: 
" This case involves a p'int of consider'ble importance, 
'bout which the court don't find nothin' laid down in the 
Code. Ther' ain't no doubt 'bout the cow belongin' to 
the nigger, and the court decides that p'int in his l'avor. 
But who's li'ble for the costs? Accordin' to the law the 
party losin' the case must pay the costs. Who air the 
parties to this suit ? In ev'ry case ther' must be two par- 
ties — a plaintiff and a defendant. Now it's clare the 

nigger's the plaintiff, but who's the defendant ? Mr. M 

can't be the defendant, because he didn't appear and 
claim the cow, and didn't make no defence to this suit. 
This leaves the nigger and the cow as the only rale par- 
ties befo' the court, and the nigger bein' the plaintiff, the 
cow must be the defendant. The plaintiff havin' won the 
case, the defendant is li'ble for the costs. Mr. Bailiff, I 
direct you to hold the cow 'till the costs air paid." 

Captain X. was appointed a justice of the peace in a 
country place not far from Raleigh, North Carolina. Late 
one afternoon, while riding home, he met a young woman 
and a young man who wished to be married at once. 
Now, the captain had never witnessed a marriage. Pie 
remembered having seen a book about the house years 
before with a form of marriage in it; but where it was 
he could not remember. A less assured man would have 
been sorely perplexed, but not he. He lost no time in 
removing his hat, and remarked, " Hats off in the pres- 
ence of the court." All being uncovered he said, " I'll 
swear you in fust. Hold up yer right hands." 

" Me too," asked the friend of the groom. 

" Of course," said the captain, " all witnesses must be 
sworn. You and each of you solemnly swear that the 
evidence you shall give in this case shall be the truth, th' 



214 WIT AND HUMOR. 

'ole truth, an' nothin' but the truth. You, John Marvin, 
do solemnly swear that to the best of your knowledge 
an' belief you take this yer woman ter have and ter hold 
for yerself, yer heirs, exekyerters, administrators, and as- 
signs, for your an' their use an' behoof forever ? " 

" I do," answered the groom. 

" You, Alice Ewer, take this yer man for yer husband, 
ter hev an' ter hold forever; and you do further swear 
that yon are lawfully seized in fee-simple, are free from 
all incumbrance, and hev good right to sell, bargain and 
convey to the said grantee yerself, yer heirs, administra- 
tors and assigns ? " 

" I do," said the bride, rather doubtfully. 

" Well, John," said the captain, " that'll be about a dol- 
lar 'n' fifty cents." 

" Are we married ? " asked the other. 

"Not yet, ye ain't," quoth the captain, with emphasis; 
" but the fee comes in here." After some fumbling it was 
produced ana handed over to the " court," who examined 
it to make sure that it was all right, and then pocketed 
it, and continued : 

" Know all men by these presents, that I, Captain X., 
of Kaleigh, North Carolina, being in good health and of 
sound and disposin' mind, in consideration of a dollar 'n' 
fifty cents to me in hand paid, the receipt whereof is 
hereby acknowledged, do and by these presents have de- 
clared you man and wife during good behavior, and till 
otherwise ordered by the court " 

Field, Stephen J. — A rather spare old gentleman, 
with thin, greyish whiskers, and wearing a pair of highly 
polished spectacles, leaned over the counter in the South- 
ern Pacific Company's ticket office, in San Francisco, and 
asked a round-trip ticket to Portland. 

" Thirty dollars," promptly responded the clerk. 



BENCH AND BAR 215 

The passenger laid the gold on the counter, and the 
clerk pulled the ticket out of the case and handed it 
toward him with a well-inked pen. 

" What's that for ? " asked the passenger, with a touch 
of contempt in his tone and glancing toward the pen. 

" Sign there, please." 

"No, sir; I refuse. There is no law in the United 
States compelling me to sign a railroad ticket. There is 
your money. Give me the ticket." 

The somewhat ruffled agent looked at the passenger 
and then at the ticket, but did not touch the money. 
" What is your name, sir ? " he asked at length. 

" Stephen J. Field," was the reply. 

Then it dawned upon the rather dazed mind of the 
young man behind the counter that he was talking to one 
of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. 
He quietly stamped the unsigned ticket, handed it to the 
passenger with a subdued air, and as he put the money in 
the drawer he was observed by the bystanders to be in a 
very reflective mood. 

Garland, A. H. — When Garland was Attorney-Gen- 
eral of the United States, he had a series of complaints 
from New York merchants on the subject of the debts of 
a young lawyer from the big town who was employed in 
the department. Garland was not a believer in the sys- 
tem of exacting the payment of private debts by govern- 
ment employees by the use of the official thumbscrew, 
and he made it a point to decline to receive personal com- 
plaints of this sort while he was in office. But the letters 
of the New York creditors of this young man became 
so petulant and threatening that the Attorney-General 
finally sent for the debtor to ask him if he was making 
any effort to settle. 



216 WIT AND HUMOR 

" Young man," said the Attorney-General when the 
subject of the complaints entered his office, "just read 
over a few of these letters, will you, and then tel L me if 
you think it's pleasant for me to have my mail burdened 
with such effusions ? " 

" Oh, creditors' letters, I suppose," replied the young 
man, coolly. " What do they suppose you've got to do 
with my debts, sir ? " 

" I have been endeavoring to arrive at some answer to 
that question myself," replied Garland. "Their desire 
is, however, to have me put it to you that you've either 
got to pay these debts or be discharged from the govern- 
ment employ." 

" That's nice of them, I'm sure, sir," replied the youth 
from New York. " Then I suppose I'm to be fired ? " 

" Suppose you just doff your flippant manner," said the 
Attorney-General, severely, " and tell me about these 
debts. Are they all straight ? " 

" Straight as a string, sir," replied the young man, 
frankly. " I contracted them at a period when I was in- 
dustriously engaged in playing the races, poker, and the 
devil, and I've never been able to get my head above 
water since, although I've been blowing in $1,000 out of 
my yearly $1,800 in a vain attempt to square up with 
these people ever since I got this job in the Department 
of Justice." 

The Attorney-General looked the young fellow over. 

" Well, do the best you can, my boy," he said, and three 
days later the young New Yorker was promoted to a 
$2,500 position. His New York creditors probably still 
preserve the red-hot letters which Garland wrote them 
in reply to their violent demands for the thumbscrewing 
of the young man. 



BENCH AND BAR 217 

Gibson, John Bannister. — Chief Justice Gibson, of 
Pennsylvania, was a jurist of the first magnitude, ranking 
worthily with Marshall, Kent, Shaw and Mansfield. His 
playful humor and quick wit brightened the pathway of 
his judicial career. A musician of rare ability, he car- 
ried his violin wherever he went, and told friends that 
he solved many a knotty problem while extemporizing 
chords or melodies on its strings. 

Clearness, force and beauty are marked characteristics 
of Gibson's opinions. Chief Justice Black, himself a 
master of style, says: 

" An opinion of his was an unbroken chain of logic 
from the beginning to the end. His argumentation was 
always characterized by great power, and sometimes it 
rose into irresistible energy, dashing opposition to pieces 
with a force like that of a battering-ram. Though the 
least voluminous writer of the court, the citations from 
him at the bar are more numerous than from all the rest 
put together. In some points he had not his equal on 
earth. Such vigor, clearness and precision of thought 
were never before united with the same felicity of dic- 
tion. Brougham has sketched Lord Stowell, justly enough, 
as the greatest judicial writer that England could boast 
of, for force and beauty of style. He selects a sentence 
and calls on the reader to admire the remarkable ele- 
gance of its structure. I believe that Judge Gibson never 
wrote an opinion in his life from which a passage might 
not be taken stronger, as well as more graceful in its turn 
of expression, than this which is selected with so much 
care by a most zealous friend from all of Lord Sto well's." 

Gibson was a practical joker. Once when Buchanan 
was his room-mate on circuit, and he himself unable to 
sleep, he waked Buchanan at intervals all night by put- 



218 WIT AND HUMOR 

ting up the Venetian blinds of the window and letting 
them fall with a crash. 

In an argument in the Supreme Court an involved 
speaker made a pause, saying: 

"JSTow, if the court understands me — " 

Gibson replied quickly: 

" I think we possibly understand you now, but if you 
continue I fear we shall not." 

He had a law office in Beaver for one year, lS0tL-5. 
After Burnside came upon the supreme bench (he and 
Gibson had been former friends) they were speaking of 
their ages. Gibson stated his, and Burnside said: 

"Why, Gibson, you are a year older; you forgot the 
year you lived in Beaver." 

" My God, Burnside, don't bring that up against me, it 
ought not to be counted." 

The tradition is that he spent that year fiddling in his 
office. 

In an article by Gibson in the American Law Eegister 
for March, 1853, is the following passage on codification: 

" Of all legal mechanism, statutory mechanism is the 
most imperfect; and this is one of the strongest objections 
to American codification. It is always adapted to the 
circumstances of a single case in the mind's eye of the 
constructor ; and when it is required to work on any other, 
it works badly or not at all. A legislator who has but 
one model is like a shoemaker who has but one last." 

To an attorney who said : " Judge, I observe you are 
a good listener," he replied : 

"That is an art, sir, an acquisition, to be able to look 
one right in the eye and seem to hear all, yet lost in your 
reflections, to hear nothing; that, sir, is the very acme of 
judicial ability. 



BENCH AND BAR. 219' 

A lawyer addressing the court caught the eyes of the 
chief justice fixed upon him, and saw him now and then 
noting something on a paper before him. After he finished 
he said to a friend beside him: 

" I think I have the chief justice; he drank in all I said ; 
I should like to see his notes." 

The court adjourned, and Gibson walked off leaving the 
paper. 

The friend went up and looked at it, and was surprised 
to see no notes, but written every here and there : 

"Fool — fool— fool." 

Gowns. — If one would excite his risibles or arouse his 
contempt at the absurdities of official costumes, let him 
read of the rivalries and jealousies among judges, barris- 
ters and advocates, and the orders, both legal and judi- 
cial, as to parti-colored garments, and who might wear 
scarlet or yellow or black, .and who might trim their 
collars or ruffs or gowns and wigs with ermine or miniver, 
and who only with lambskin, in old England. But our 
republican common-sense has reacted upon the mother 
country, and the late Chief Justice Campbell, in his Lives 
of the Chancellors, alluding to wigs, says : 

" Who would have supposed that this grotesque orna- 
ment, fit only for an African chief, would be considered 
indispensable to the administration of justice in the mid- 
dle of the nineteenth century." 

The rigid observance of old English rules in the South 
Carolina courts, and a neglect of the same by Mr. James 
Louis Petigru, gave rise to the following passage : 

" Mr. Petigru," said the judge, " you have on a light 
coat. You can't speak." 

Petigru replied : " May it please the bench, I conform 
strictly to the law. Let me illustrate: The law says that 



220 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the barrister shall wear a black gown and coat, and your 
honor thinks that means a black coat." 

" Yes," said the judge. 

" Well, the law also says the sheriff shall wear a cocked 
hat and sword. Does your honor hold that the sword 
must be cocked as well as the hat?" He was permitted 
to go on. 

Are lawyers conducting themselves with less courtesy 
and refinement, or with less respect to the court, than 
they have for the past hundred years, that they must now 
be rebuked and awed by majestic gowns; and will they 
have a higher regard for one of their number elevated to 
the bench when disguised in the garb of a woman ? If 
the multitude are to be somewhat civilized and refined 
by gowns, the judges will need to wear them, not in 
courts alone, but in all public places; which would quite 
as much incommode them as the judicial wig did Lord 
Eldon, who prayed the king " that when he was not sit- 
ting at a court he might be allowed to appear in his own 
hair." 

Hon. William M. Hall, of the Bedford, Pa., bar, writes 
forcefully on the subject of gowns: 

"A real judge, who has dignity of character and con- 
duct, whose knowledge of the law and manifest integrity 
of intention are known and read of all men, needs no 
robe. He has authority behind him — the majesty of the 
commonwealth which he represents. He has the rever- 
ence of law which an intelligent people entertain. Vest- 
ments may be necessary to impress ignorance. They are 
of no use in a contact with intelligence. They do not 
dignify want of legal learning or give strength to weak- 
ness or integrity to a political schemer. 

" In a profound respect for law and the administration 



BENCH AND BAR. 221 

of justice, the American people are excelled by no na- 
tionality, ancient or modern. The basis of it is not form 
or ceremony, not robes or wigs. It is an intelligent 
knowledge of the constitution of the government, and an 
appreciation of the necessity of respect for the adminis- 
trators of distributive justice in order to the well-being 
of the community, which every good citizen has at heart. 

" Do robes add to the force or strength of the pulpit 
orator ? You cannot transmit dullness into discernment, 
ignorance into knowledge, attenuated drivel into logic, 
or a nerveless grasp into administrative talent, by encas- 
ing the man with a silk gown. 

"Next after Almighty God the American people rever- 
ence law. It commands their respect, not through fear 
nor through forms or ceremonies, not on the basis of 
omne ignotum pro nobile, but because of an intelligent 
understanding of the principles of government, and the 
recognized necessity for a profound respect for consti- 
tuted authority. They themselves help to make the law, 
and are a part of the sovereign power of which the judge 
is the representative. It is public opinion, not outward 
show, that gives majesty to the judge. It is the office, 
not the man, that is reverenced. The incumbent is re- 
spected because he fills the office worthily. No mere 
external sign is needed to inspire respect. An earnest, 
honest and proper discharge of the duties of the position 
insures it. You belittle real greatness when you dress it 
in toggery, and you fail to elevate incompetency by cloth- 
ing it in a gown. 

" In the early days of Dickinson College, when it was a 
Presbyterian institution, Dr. Nesbit, a Scotch divine, was 
imported to act as president. He was a pompous man, of 
great personal dignity, and wore a long camlet cloak 
lined with showy scarlet and fastened at the neck with 



222 WIT AND HUMOR 

•a silver clasp. One morning, as he took his constitutional 
walk in the suburbs of Carlisle, clad in his distinguished- 
looking garment, which fluttered somewhat in the breeze 
and displayed in part its brilliant lining, he passed a wag- 
oner who strode along beside his team, with his black- 
snake whip under his arm, ' whistling as he went for want 
of thought.' ■ Good morning, sir,' said the doctor, with 
head erect and with a condescending nod, and a strong em- 
phasis upon the sir. Eyeing him askance, with a formal 
bow, the wagoner replied, ' Good morning, madam.' 

"Everywhere through Europe are forms and ceremonies 
and official costumes and insignia — the effete remains of 
feudal times — more or less difficult to get rid of, doubt- 
less, in an old and artificially constituted society. Noth- 
ing can be more unbecoming and uncomfortable than a 
horse-hair wig, such as are worn by the English barristers. 
To see a man in the midst of an argument lift the un- 
sightly thing from his overheated head with one hand, 
while he runs the other through, his natural hair to give 
his pate air and relief, is amusing to an American eye. 
It strikes one as absurdly ludicrous. 

" What effect has the wearing of the gown upon the 
judge himself? Does it tend to puff him up and make 
him think more highly of himself than he ought to think ? 
It won't add to his real knowledge of the law. Will it 
tend to make him think he knows more than he really 
does ? Will it minister to a desire for ostentation ? Will 
gowns add to the comfort of the judges ? Is it because 
of the loose and easy fit of the garment that it has been 
adopted ? If this is the ground, no one can object to it. 
But if it is with a desire to give dignity to the bench and 
impress the public by ostentatious display, it is a mistake 
and a step backward. It does not harmonize well with 
republican institutions and will fail of its object. The 



BENCH AND BAR. 223 

true dignity of the bench springs from the reverence of 
the people for law, and the intelligent appreciation of 
the character of the judges. To seek to impress them 
through their eyes is lowering the standard, and is a re- 
trogression toward the effete past." 

The people who object so strenuously to gowns for 
judges and to the imaginary danger of gowns for law- 
yers find an amusing, if exaggerated, prototype in the 
American citizen represented by " Sam Slick," who, it is 
perhaps needless to say, was in reality the Eova Scotia 
judge, Thomas C. Haliburton. " What on airth," said he, 
" can a black gownd have to do with intelligence ? Them 
sort of liveries may do in Europe, but they don't convene 
to our free and enlightened citizens. It's too foreign for 
us, too unphilosophical, too feudal, and a remnant of the 
dark ages. No, sir; our lawyers do as they like. Some 
of 'em dress in black, and some in white; some carry 
walking-sticks, and some umbrellas; some whittle sticks 
with penknives, and some shave the table; and some put 
their legs under the desks, and some put 'em on a-top 
of 'em, just as it suits 'em. They set as they please, 
dress as they please, and talk as the} 7 please. We are a 
free people. I guess if a judge in our country was to 
order the lawyers to appear all dressed in black, they'd 
soon ax him who elected him director-general of fashions, 
and where he found such arbitrary power in the consti- 
tution as that, committed to any man." 

Grant, Sir William. — Many great men have been 
remarkably silent and taciturn. One of these was Grant, 
the learned Master of the Eolls. He was the most pa- 
tient of judges. He listened for two days to an argument 
as to the effect of a certain Act of Parliament, and, when 
counsel had finished, simply said, " Gentlemen, that Act 
has been repealed." 



22i WIT AND HUMOR. 

On one of his visits to his native county of Banff, he 
rode for a few miles accompanied by some friends. The 
only observation which escaped him was when passing a 
field of peas: " Yery fine peas." Next day he rode out 
with the same party and was equally silent; but on again 
passing the identical field of peas he muttered, "And 
very finely podded, too." 

Grier, Robert C— The late Judge Grier, of the Su- 
preme Court of the United States, owned a fine farm 
adjoining the city of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The 
Philadelphia & Erie Eailroad bisected this farm so as 
to render^ it undesirable for agricultural purposes. The 
judge claimed damages for land taken and injuries to 
the property. The jury being upon the ground to view 
it, and accompanied by the judge, his attorneys and the 
attorneys for the railroad company, a pathetic scene was 
enacted when the venerable and dignified judge la- 
mented this ruthless invasion of his domain, and that in 
his old age he must see the lands, almost sacred to him, 
despoiled by an insatiable corporation that has not re- 
gard even for the spot of earth where in his youth he had 
wooed and won his bride, and where the happiest days 
of his life were passed. And in his own forcible and in- 
imitable style, and with his head resting upon the upper 
rail of the fence, he exclaimed : 

" Can it be possible that a citizen of Pennsylvania has 
no rights which are secure from the grasp of these cor- 
porations ? " 

At this point C. W. Scates, attorney for the corporation, 
archly, and in apparent sympathy with the judge, replied : 

" No, my dear judge, no more rights now than the 
Dred Scott decision gives to the nigger." 

Immediately the judge dried his tears, and with em- 
phasis replied: "I stand by the Dred Scott decision." 



BENCH AND BAR. 225 

Grosscup, P. S. — Judge Grosscup's response to the 
toast, The Federal Judiciary, at the banquet of the Illinois 
bar in 1896, is a fine tribute to Chief Justice Marshall 
and the Supreme Court of which he was a great leader: 

After hearing General Black on " John Marshall," I 
must confess I would rather have his career than any- 
other. He has influenced development in this country far 
more than either Washington or Lincoln. They were 
part of the great movements of their time. John Marsh- 
all was a great movement in himself, and built the judi- 
cial structure of which we are the heirs and beneficiaries. 
When the constitutional convention was held in 1777, only 
the seed was planted, and no one knew to what a growth 
it would come. In Marshall's mind alone was the* seed ger- 
minated which has brought forth what we call America. 

Marshall was the personification of the Federal judi- 
ciary. It was Marshall and the Supreme Court of the 
United States that developed all those great qualities 
which mark the republic's achievements. The clause that 
the law of the United States should be the supreme law 
of the land was Marshall's. Out of that has grown the 
great system by which the Supreme Court of the United 
States lays hands on all others, consolidates and unifies 
all judicial tribunals of this country, preventing any lo- 
cality from tarnishing or destroying the national honor; 
that has developed all the transportation facilities of this 
land so that they have been made a single department of 
a central government. I see among us our senior senator, 
and I say to him and to you that in my judgment the 
man who has given this clause the first legislative sanc- 
tion has a place more resplendent than eight years of the 
presidency will give him. 

We have fallen on times which may seem somewhat 
strange. The judiciary of the United States had to bear, 
15 



226 WIT AND HUMOR. 

however, much from popular clamor and fanaticism one 
hundred years ago. It is to Marshall and the Supreme 
Court of the United States that I owe it that my allegiance 
lias not to travel through Springfield before it reaches 
Washington. If I violate the law of the country, the 
punishment comes from Washington direct. 

The judiciary of the United States represents the great 
middle class — the bulk of the population between the 
criminal rich and the restless poor, who, after all, are the 
salt and savor of our institutions. No man in America 
has the monopoly of humanitarianism. The Federal ju- 
diciary cannot mark equality, but it can make conditions 
better. We are continually going upward. From biv- 
ouac to bivouac we climb still to a greater height in our 
march of progress. Humanity is not going to Calvary. 
It is on the road to the culmination of the teachings of 
Him who on the hills of Galilee said: "Go forth and 
teach all the world what I have told you." Humanity is 
not going forth to be crucified on a cross of gold nor to 
wear a crown of thorns. It is going upward toward that 
golden effulgence of humanity's resurrection morning. 

Harrington, Theophilus. — Judge Harrington, of 
Vermont, away back in the first decade of the century, 
when asked to return a runaway slave, refused on the 
ground of insufficient evidence. 

"What would you regard as sufficient?" asked the 
claimant. 

" Nothing short of a bill of sale from Almighty God ! " 
was the reply. 

Hathaway, Samuel G. — Hathaway, of New York, 
of broad culture, fine literary accomplishments and great 
ability, shone in the front rank as one of the splendid 



BENCH AND BAR 227 

leaders of the Elmira bar. His was a lovable nature, 
brimming over with joyous humor. And his wit — when 
wit was required. — shot like a flash to the front. 

His arguments were constructed to convince rather 
than to amuse. Though persistent at times in urging his 
points to the court, his courtesy and tactful wit presented 
them without the shadow of impudence. On one occa- 
sion, in a trial before an eminent judge with whom he 
had been always on terms of great intimacy, he offered 
evidence, to which the opposing counsel objected. His 
honor sustained the objection. 

" Will your honor allow me to state another reason why 
I deem the evidence proper?" said Hathaway. 

" Certainly," said the judge; and the reason was given 
with great ingenuity and force. 

" Still I think the testimony should not be received, 
even on that view of the case," replied his honor, stating 
the grounds upon which he founded his opinion. 

" But perhaps there is another view of the case, which, 
if your honor will allow me to suggest it, may obviate 
the difficulty in your honor's mind." 

" I will hear you," said the judge, " although it is clear 
to my mind that the testimony cannot be received in any 
point of view." 

Hathaway presented a new theory as to the admissi- 
bility of the evidence. But the judge, inflexible in his 
opinion, directed counsel to proceed with the trial. 

"I am so confident that this evidence should be re- 
ceived," said Hathaway, " that I wish to be heard fur- 
ther." 

The patience of the court being now exhausted, the 
judge said, rather sharply: 

" Colonel Hathaway, what do you think I am sitting 
here for?" 



22S WIT AND HUMOR 

" Now your honor has me," said Hathaway, with one 
of his deferential smiles. 

The infinite good humor and piquancy of this reply 
set the bar, jury and spectators in a roar of laughter, in 
which it was difficult for the judge himself, who loved a 
joke, to refrain from joining. "With great gravity and 
dignity, however, he directed counsel to proceed with the 
trial of the cause. 

Hathaway disliked pretension, sham, conceit and far- 
fetched phraseology. In a malpractice case in which he 
was counsel, a pretentious physician was a witness against 
his client. While giving his testimony, the doctor re- 
moved his glasses, and, assuming a very pompous air, 
said : 

" Mr. Hathaway, I see, sir, that you do not understand 
the agglutination in cases of chronic peritonitis." 

Hathawa}^ made no reply at the time, but in his ad- 
dress to the jury said : 

" Gentlemen of the jury, Doctor S has very frankly 

informed me that I am entirely ignorant of what he calls 
i agglutination in a case of peritonitis.' I really think the 
doctor is in the same condition himself. He reminds me 
of another learned member of his profession, who, more 
frank than our doctor here, said to a lawyer one day: 
' Lawyer, I cannot comprehend what you meant yester- 
day, when you talked about docking an entail.' 

" ' My dear doctor,' replied the lawyer, i I don't wonder 
at that. I will explain the meaning; it is, doctor, doing 
what you never can do — it is effecting a recovery? " 

His passing away is touchingly told by a friend : 
"As the 15th of April, 1864, drew to a close, a beau- 
tiful sunset lingered upon the landscape in front of 
Hathaway's room. He watched it until the last rays 



BENCH AND BAR. 229 

faded away; then, whispering to those standing by, he 
said: 

" ' So the sun of my life goes down, but it will rise again 
to-morrow.' " 

" The morrow came, and with its first bright sunbeams 
death came as gently, as softly, almost as sweetly, as that 
glorious sunlight fell upon the morning air." 

Hawkins, Henry. — The retirement of Sir Henry 
Hawkins from the bench of Old Bailey is yet a prolific 
motive for anecdotes of this jurist. His picturesque and 
magnetic figure is thus described: He favored clothes of 
an old-fashionecl and distinctly racy cut, tight trousers, a 
morning coat with large hip pockets and fancy vest, and 
either a white bowler hat or a stovepipe, with a particu- 
larly wide brim. The wide brim was softly suggestive 
of the betting ring, it being one of the peculiarities of a 
school of sportsmen to affect a certain garb which bears 
a resemblance to that of the church. 

Hawkins once had to sentence an old swindler, and gave 
him seven years. The man in the clock squirmed and 
whined : 

" Oh, my lord, I'll never live half the time." 
Hawkins took another look at him and answered: 
" I don't think it is at all desirable that you should." 
The formality of asking a newly-convicted prisoner if 
he had anything to say why sentence should not be 
passed upon him brought another characteristic retort 
from the judge. A prisoner in these circumstances usu- 
ally either says nothing or curses at large in his rage, but 
one of them struck a theatrical posture and with his right 
hand in the air, shouted: 

"May the Almighty strike me dead if I don't speak 
the truth. I am innocent of this crime." 



230 WIT AND HUMOR 

Hawkins said nothing for about a minute, when, after 
glancing at the clock, he fulminated in his most impres- 
sive tones: 

" Since the Almighty has not thought fit to intervene, 
I will now proceed to pass sentence." 

In a trial before Hawkins a dock laborer was subjected 
to a vigorous cross-examination, in the midst of which 
the learned judge put a question to him, which, not hear- 
ing his lordship's remark, the counsel quickly capped 
with another before the dock-hand had time to reply. 
" Look here ! " said the latter to the eminent gentleman 
examining him. "You shut up; I'm talking to the gov- 
ernor now." 

Hawkins was presiding over a tedious trial, listening, 
apparently with absorbed attention, to a long, uninterest- 
ing speech from a counsel learned in the law. Presently 
he made a pencil memorandum, folded it, and sent it by 
an usher to the counsel, who, unfolding it, found these 
words: 

" Patience competition. Gold Medal, Sir Henry Hawk- 
ins. Honorable mention, Job." 

Counsel wound up his argument with as little delay as 
possible. 

Hawkins was once taken to be a member of the P. K. 
He was waiting to take his ticket at a railway station in 
Paris, at which there were a number of English roughs 
returning from the races, one of whom was very rude to 
him. The judge remonstrated, whereupon the man be- 
came more insulting, and said that if he would come out- 
side he would give him " what for." Sir Henry, who 
wears his hair cut very short, then took off his hat, think- 
ing that as the men were probably of the criminal classes 
they would recognize him, and quietly remarked: 

" Perhaps you do not know who I am ? " 



BENCH AND BAR 231 

Did the man in awe-stricken tones exclaim: " 'Awkins, 
oy thunder ? " 

No, what he said was: " S'elp me bob, a bloomin' prize- 
fighter. Not me ! " and the judge was not further mo- 
lested. 

The caustic remarks of Hawkins have not always been 
confined to the bench. At the opening of an assize the 
chaplain preached what he conceived to be a distinctly 
good sermon, and he had the temerity to sound Hawkins 
on the subject: "Did you approve of my sermon, my 
lord?" 

" I remarked in your sermon, Mr. Chaplain, two things 
which, to be candid, I did not approve of, and which I 
have, I am glad to say, never remarked on a similar oc- 
casion." 

" They were, my lord ? " was the anxious question of 
the preacher. 

" The striking of the clock twice, sir." 

During the hearing of the Tranby Croft baccarat case, 
much comment was caused by the manner in which Lord 
Coleridge allowed the bench to be occupied by lady spec- 
tators. Shortly after this case, Hawkins had to hear a 
libel action arising out of criticisms Mr. Parkinson, of the 
London County Council, had passed upon the moral char- 
acter of some marionettes which were then being exhib- 
ited at the Westminster Aquarium. The marionettes — 
two male dolls and a female figure — were produced in 
court. 

" Where shall .we put these figures ? " asked counsel. 

"I suppose the lady," said Sir Henry, maliciously, 
" ought to be accommodated with a seat on the bench." 

As a junior counsel, Hawkins was once practicing be- 
fore Lord Campbell, who was somewhat pedantic. In ad- 



232 WIT AND HUMOR 

dressing the jury, Hawkins, in referring to a brougnam, 
pronounced the word with two syllables — brou-am. " Ex- 
cuse me," said his lordship, blandly, " but I think that 
if instead of saying ' brough-am ' you were to say ' broom. ' 
you would be more intelligible to the jury, and, more- 
over, you would save a syllable." " I am much obliged 
to your lordship," quietly replied Hawkins; and he pro- 
ceeded to bring his address to a close. Presently, the 
judge, in summing up, made use of the word " omnibus." 
Instantly Hawkins exclaimed: "Pardon me, m' lud, but 
I would take the liberty of suggesting that instead of 
saying ' omnibus ' your lordship should say ' bus,' and 
you would then be more intelligible to the jury, and be- 
sides you would save two syllables. 1 ' 

Sir Fitzjames Stephen, in referring to the humors, 
quips and cranks of Hawkins relates that he once asked 
Hawkins: 

" How is it that you will persist in always behaving 
like a third-rate comic actor ? " 

"Why," replied Hawkins, " because I do it so devilish 
well, my boy." 

Hearsay. — An eminent lord chief justice, trying a 
right-of-way case in England, had before him an old 
farmer, who was proceeding to tell the jury that he had 
" knowed the path for sixty year, and my feyther tould I 
as he heerd my grand-fey ther say — " 

" Stop ! " said the judge, " we can't have any hearsay 
evidence here." 

" Not ? " exclaimed the farmer. " Then how dost know 
who thy feyther was 'cept by hearsay ? " 

After the laughter had subsided, the judge said : " In 
courts of law we can only be guided by what you have 
seen with your eyes." 



BENCH AND BAR. 233 

" Oh, that be bio wed for a tale ! " replied the farmer. 
" I ha' a bile on the back of my neck, and I never seed 
'un, but I be prepared to swear that he's there." 

An Irish witness was being examined as to his knowl- 
edge of a shooting affair. 

" Did you see the shot fired ? " the magistrate asked. 

" No, sorr. I only heard it." 

" That evidence is not satisfactory," replied the magis- 
trate sternly; "stand down!" 

The witness proceeded to leave the box, and directly 
his back was turned he laughed derisively. 

The magistrate, indignant at this contempt of court, 
asked him how he dared to laugh in court. 

" Did ye see me laugh, your honor ? " 

"No, sir, but I heard you." 

" That evidence is not satisfactory," said the witness 
with a twinkle in his eye. 

At this everybody laughed except the magistrate. 

The rule excluding hearsay evidence, or rather the mode 
in which that rule is frequently misunderstood in courts 
•of justice, is amusingly caricatured by Mr. Dickens in his 
report of the case of Bardell v. Pickwick: 

" I believe you are in the service of Mr. Pickwick, the 
defendant in this case. Speak up, if you please, Mr. 
Weller." 

" I mean to speak up, sir," replied Sam. " I am in the 
service o' that 'ere gen'l'man, and werry good service 
it is." 

"Little to do and plenty to get, I suppose?" said Ser- 
geant Buzfuz with jocularity. 

" Oh ! quite enough to get, sir, as the soldier said ven 
they ordered him three hundred and fifty lashes," replied 
-Sam. 



234 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" You must not tell us what the soldier or any other 
man said, sir," interposed the judge, "it's not evidence." 
" Werry good, my lord," replied Sam. 

Prosecuting attorney (to witness): "State where you 
were born." 

Attorney for the defence (rising in great excitement) : 
" I 'bject, y'r honor ! " 

" What is your objection ? " 

" This man has no positive knowledge where he was 
born. All he knows about it is what his parents told him. 
Hearsay testimony, y'r honor, is not — " 

" I think it will do no harm for the witness to answer 
the question." 

(Hastily consulting with colleagues.) " We take excep- 
tions, y'r honor." 

Prosecuting attorney: " You may answer the question, 
Mr. Thompson — by the way, you spell Thompson with 
a " p," do you not ? " 

Attorney for the defence (jumping up frantically): 
" 'Bject." 

The court: "The objection is overruled." 

Attorney for the defence (again consulting colleagues): 
" We take exception." 

Prosecuting attorney (wiping his brow): " Gentlemen, 
isn't it too warm in this room ? " 

Attorney for the defence (?nechanically) : "'Bject." 

Henry, Patrick. — Governor Giles, of Virginia, wrote 
Patrick Henry, demanding satisfaction: 

" Sir, I understand that you have called me a ' bob-tail ' 
politician. I wish to know if it be true ; and if true, your 
meaning. Wm. B. Giles." 

To which Henry replied: 

" Sir, I do not recollect having called you a bob-tail 
politician at any time, but think it probable I have. Not 



BENCH AND BAR. 235 

recollecting the time or occasion, I can't say what I did 
mean ; but if you will tell me what you think I meant, I 
will say whether you are correct or not. 

" Yery respectfully, 

"Patrick Henry." 

In the midst of the magnificent debate in the Yirginia 
House of Burgesses on the resolutions offered against the 
Stamp Act, while descanting on the tyranny of the act, 
Henry exclaimed in a voice of thunder, and with the look 
of a god, " Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his 
Cromwell, and George the Third " — " Treason ! " cried 
the speaker. " Treason, treason ! " echoed from every 
part of the house. It was one of those trying moments 
which are so decisive of character. He faltered not an 
instant; but rising to a loftier altitude, and fixing on the 
speaker an eye of most determined fire, he finished his 
sentence with the firmest emphasis, " may profit by their 
example. If this be treason, make the most of it." Hi& 
resolution passed the house by a small majority. 

Henry said in the Continental Congress, September 5 r 
1Y74: "I am not a Virginian, but an American." 

Hitchcock, Peter. — Chief Justice Hitchcock, of the 
Supreme Court of Ohio, was oue of the great men of his 
day. While holding court at Cincinnati, an attorney who 
believed in the use of authorities to convince judges had 
filled the table in front of the bench with a stock of law- 
books. When court opened and the judges were seated,. 
Hitchcock, looking at the attorney and then at his stock 
of books, observed : 

" Brother R, do you mean to rile the court with all 
those books ? I will have you know, sir, that this court 
does not keep a law-school ! " 



236 WIT AND HUMOR 

"But I do," was the cutting reply, "and I mean to 
teach you judges a bit of law." 

The judge quit at this point, and counsel proceeded 
with his argument. 

On another occasion a young attorney remarked, at 
the close of his argument, that the record in the case and 
his brief conclusively showed the merits of his client's 
side, and he hoped that the court would read them. 

Hitchcock quickly said: 

"Do you mean to insinuate that the court does not 
read the papers in the case ? You are impudent, sir ! " 

" I do not insinuate at all," replied the attorney, " nor 
am I impudent. I merely ask the court to read the rec- 
ord ; and the reason of my polite request is, that, taking 
account of the last decision your honors made against 
me, I don't believe the court looked at the papers at all, 
let alone read them." 

Hitchcock quietly said to his associates on the bench: 

" I wonder if the young man is not about half right ? " 

Some members of the bar present thought he was all 
right. 

Holt, Lord. — If a young man sows wild oats he may 
forget about it, but other people have longer memories. 
Holt, when young, was very extravagant, and belonged 
to a club of wild fellows, most of whom took an infamous 
course of life. When his lordship was engaged at the 
Old Bailey, a man was tried and convicted of a robbery 
whom the judge remembered to have been one of his old 
companions. Moved by that curiosity which is natural 
on a retrospection of past life, Holt, thinking the fellow 
did not know him, asked what had become of such and 
such of his old associates. 

"Ah, mv lord," said the culprit, "they are all hanged 
but your lordship and I." 



BENCH AND BAR. 237 

Index. — To prepare an index is, by no means, an 
amusing occupation; but to glance over one often is. 
The story about Mr. Best's great mind is a classic. As 
usually quoted it occurred as an entry in the index to 
Binn's "Justice: " 

Best, Mr. Justice, his great mind. 
And when the reader turned to the designated page, full 
of anticipatory admiration, he found only: 

" Mr. Justice Best said that he had a great mind to 
commit the man for trial." 

In one of the Scotch Eeports: "Blasphemous publica- 
tion — see Bible." 

In the Canada Law Journal : " Devil — see Church of 
England." 

Ingersoll, Robert G. — One of the stories of how 
Ingersoll failed to be nominated for governor of Illinois 
recounts that a friend entered his law office in Peoria 
one day and looked over his book shelves. 

" How much did this cost you," he asked, looking at a 
copy of Paine's "The Age of Keason." 

" The Governorship of Illinois." 

Ingersoll was invited to attend a banquet at the Clover 
Club, New York. 

" It is impossible to accept," he said. " I know your 
custom too well. I shall be called on for a speech and 
will be unmercifully guyed. I never could stand it. I re- 
fuse to put myself in such a position." 

The club decided to waive the constitutional preroga- 
tive in his case, and he was informed of the fact. 

" Then I gladly accept the invitation, and will surely 
be on hand." 

He was. No sooner had the gallant iconoclast reached 



238 WIT AND HUMOR. 

his feet than a chap down at the end of the room began 
to interrupt. He was the only one in the club to say a 
word, but he was very annoying, and Ingersoll remarked : 

" I came here as a guest, with the understanding that 
I was not to be interrupted. There was an agreement to 
that effect." 

The man retorted : 

" I never heard of any such agreement ! " 

The breaker of images said: 

" My friend, you remind me of a story. There was a 
day set apart by the beasts of the field, the reptiles and 
the birds of the air for a general peace. Animals in the 
habit of preying upon each other agreed to meet together 
in one grand accord. A fox passing a chicken roost on 
the way to the meeting invited a hen to accompany him, 
and, when she politely declined, informed her of the peace 
agreement. c Well, Mr. Fox, I will go under those con- 
ditions,' she said, and they trotted along side by side. 

" Presently the baying of a pack of hounds was heard, 
and Mr. Fox started to run. ' Why do you run, Mr. Fox ? ' 
said Mrs. Hen. ' Remember the peace agreement.' Re- 
straining himself Mr. Fox trotted on, but the pack of 
hounds drew nearer and nearer until he could stand it no 
longer. ' Mr. Fox,' urged Mrs. Hen, ' don't be afraid. Re- 
member what you told me about the peace agreement. 
No hound would hurt you to-day. Trot along with me, 
and don't be in the least alarmed.' He could almost feel 
the breath of the hounds. ' Mrs. Hen,' he whispered, pre- 
pared to spring away, * I do well remember the peace 
agreement, but there may be some fool hound in that pack 
that hasn't heard of it. Good by.' " 

When Ingersoll had finished this story there was dead 
silence and he concluded his speech without further in- 
terruption. 



BENCH AND BAR. 239 

Ingersoll's address at the soldiers' reunion, Indianapo- 
lis, is one of the most touchingly beautiful examples of 
vision in English literature. Its pathetic wit — broadly 
human — is eloquence of the highest order : 

" The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are 
in the great struggle for national life. "We hear the sounds 
of preparation — the music of the boisterous drums, the 
silver voices of heroic bugles. We see thousands of assem- 
blages, and hear the appeals of orators; we see the pale 
cheeks of women and the flushed faces of men ; and in 
those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have 
covered with flowers. We lose sight of them' no more. 
We are with them when they enlist in the great army of 
freedom. We see them part from those they love. Some 
are walking for the last time in quiet woody places with 
the maidens they adore. We hear the whisperings and 
the sweet vows of eternal love as they lingeringly part 
forever. Others are bending over cradles, kissing babes 
that are asleep. Some are receiving the blessings of old 
men. Some are parting with mothers who hold them and 
press them to their hearts again and again, and say noth- 
ing; and some are talking with wives, and endeavoring 
with brave words spoken in the old tones to drive from 
their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. We see 
the wife standing in the door, with the babe in her arms — 
standing in the sunlight sobbing; at the turn of the road 
a hand waves — she answers by holding high in her loving 
hands the child. He is gone — and forever." 

Ingersoll and Eev. Henry Ward Beecher were always 
great friends. Beecher had a celestial globe in his study, 
a present from some manufacturer. On it was an excel- 
lent representation of the constellations and stars which 
compose them. Ingersoll was delighted with the globe. 
He examined it closely and turned it round and round. 



240 WIT AND HUMOR. 

"It's just what I wanted," he said; "who made it?" 
"Who made it?" repeated Beecher; "who made this 
globe? Oh, nobody, Colonel; it just happened!" 

Intemperance.— In the diary of Lord Clonmell, who 
was Chief Justice of Ireland at the end of the last cent- 
ury, there is this entry in reference to one of his brother 
puisne judges: "Boyd is drunken, idle, and mad." The 
judge is described by Sir Jonah Barrington as possessing 
a face like " a scarlet pincushion well studded." A news- 
paper, in praising his humanity, said that when passing 
sentence of death "he never failed to have a drop in his 
eye." 

Mr. Fitzpatrick, in his "Ireland Before the Union," 
says that Daniel O'Connell remembered Boyd, and in a 
conversation with Mr. O'Neill, Daniel described him as 
so fond of brandy that he always kept a supply of it in 
court upon the desk before him in an inkstand of pecul- 
iar make. His lordship used to lean his arm upon the 
desk, bob down his head, and steal a hurried sip from 
time to time through a quill that lay among the pens, 
which maneuver he flattered himself escaped observa- 
tion. 

One day it was sought by counsel to convict a witness 
of having been intoxicated at the period to which his evi- 
dence referred. Grady, the counsel on the opposite side, 
labored hard to show that the man had b jen sober. 

" Come, now, my good man," said Boyd, " it is a very 
important consideration ; tell the court truly, were you 
drunk or sober upon that occasion ?" 

" Oh, quite sober, my lord," broke in Grady, with a 
significant look 2u the inkstand; "as sober as a judge." 

Magistrate to drunken vagrant: "Why didn't you an- 
swer to your name ? " 



BENCH AND BAR 241 

" Beg pardon, jedge, but I forgot wot name I gave las' 
night." 

" Didn't you give your own name ? " 
"No, jedge, I'm travelin' incog." 

A well-known lawyer, who for narrative purposes shall 
be nameless, came into the official presence of a learned 
judge whose cognomen shall likewise be discreetly veiled. 

The lawyer did not arrive alone. He was accompanied 
by a large number of previously encompassed drinks. 

" Mr. ," remarked the judge, " I am astonished to 

see you in such a condition." 

" Dishun ! " sighed the lawyer. " Wazzer matter ? " 

"There is no need of explaining, sir." 

" Yesher is. You 'tack my condishun — wazzer matter 
wish it ? " 

" To be plain, Mr. , you are very drunk." 

" Y'r honor," responded the inebriated one, "I've been 
prac'sing here for fifteen years, un' that's the firsh c'rect 
decishun I ever heard in thish court." 

It cost him something for contempt. 

An intemperate barrister sums up five reasons why men 

drink : 

If on my theme I rightly think, 
There are five reasons why men drink: 
Good wine, a friend, because I'm dry, 
Or lest I should be by and by, 
Or any other reason why. 

The inebriate who, on being reproached for not leading 
a regular life, denied the charge by saying " he returned 
home every night intoxicated," was scarcely so ingenious 
in his defence as the Scotsman in the following: 

" Tipsy as usual, James. What in the world has set 
you on the spree now ? " 

16 



242 WIT AND HUMOR. 

"Ah, ye maunna be harsh, judge — did you not hear my 
grand whistling canary was dead ? " 

" Stupid fellow ! leaving your work and getting drunk 
for the death of a bird. Don't you know a man should 
look upon such incidents as trifles ? " 

" So I do, judge, so I do, man; but if ye wanted a spree 
yerself, ye wad be glad of ony handle to turn the crane 
wi\" 

Judge William C , of a Western state, and Judge 

Caswell M , of a Southern state, were both natives 

of Lexington, Kentucky. In boyhood they had jammed 
the same cat's head into the same milk pitcher, stolen 
peaches from the same tree, got trounced by the same 
farmers, were otherwise extremely intimate friends, after- 
wards chums at college, and then errand boys in the same 
office. Later in life they parted and rose to sublime hon- 
ors in their separate places. One January, after years of 
separation, they met for the first time since their parting, 
in Lexington, and brewed a convivial bowl in honor of 
the event. About midnight, full of affection and en- 
thusiasm, they retired in the same bed. It was a huge 
affair, standing in the middle of the room and capable of 
being drawn up by ropes to the ceiling while the room 
was being cleaned. It was a very cold night, and they 
placed their clothing upon the foot of the bed. Just after 
they fell asleep four friends entered softly, drew the bed 
by ropes nearly to the ceiling, and left them thus sus- 
pended about ten feet from the floor. They then locked 

the door outside and retired. At 3 A. M., Judge 

woke with that species of thirst which usually comes 
after Kentucky punch, and technically known as "hot 
coppers." Leaping lightly out of bed to get the ice 
pitcher, he went whirling down ten feet, alighting with 



BENCH AND BAR. 243 

a soul-stirring thump on all fours. There was a long and 
painful pause. Then he peered upward through the dark- 
ness and called: 

"Caswell!" (No reply.) "Oh, Caswell!" (Feeble 
cries.) " Caz ! " 

" Eh ? — um ? — what ? " The judge was awakening. 

" I've fallen through a trap," yelled the now affrighted 
judge ; " get up and light a candle." 

"Where are you?" queried Judge C , sleepily, 

framing his opinion that his honorable brother was drunk. 

" Down here. Fell through a trap. Don't get out on 
my side of the bed." 

"All right." 

And Judge M , springing out on his own side, 

turned three somersaults and landed on the small of his 
back. Both were now convinced that they had fallen 
into a den of thieves and were possibly to be murdered. 
The jokers had closed the heavy wooden shutters, so no 
light could enter, and removed all the furniture. The 
judges groped around on hands and knees, nearly frozen 
to death, and only at daybreak discovered the bed, 
climbed into it, and got warm enough to talk the thing 
over. 

The late Judge George G. Wright, of Iowa, though a 
deeply religious man, could tell an anecdote in an inimi- 
table way. One of these anecdotes was concerning a Meth- 
odist preacher in Iowa, who quit the gospel, went back 
to the law and afterwards became a judge. One evening 
while the judge was walking along a street in Des Moines, 
a drunken man reeled up and, slapping him on the back, 
called out: 

" Oh, jedge." 

The judge stepped back and said somewhat brusquely, 



2J4 WIT AND HUMOR 

but with the politeness which he had inherited from his 
clerical profession: 

" I am not aware that I have the honor of your ac- 
quaintance, sir?" 

"Whereat the drunken man fell upon the judge's breast 
and began to sob aloud : 

" Oh, jedge, don't you know me ? Have you forgot 
me so soon ? I am (hie, hie) one of your co-co-converts ? " 

Scene in Georgia court: 

Magistrate (to prisoner): "I see you have a jug there; 
is that the whiskey that made you drunk ? " 

Prisoner: "Yes, your honor." 

Magistrate: "Pass it up here; I'll sample it." 

Tipstaff: "Pass the jug to his honor." 

Magistrate (after a long pull): "The prisoner gets 
twelve months on the chain gang. Any man that would 
get drunk on good whiskey like that, and run the risk 
of losing the jug, is irresponsible, and should be taken 
care of." 

Jackson, Andrew. — Jackson's first duel, of which 
he was ashamed and never used to speak, occurred at 
Jonesboro, Tennessee, in 1788, following a court trial in 
which he and "Waits till Avery attorney-general of North 
Carolina, were counsel. Jackson was then twenty-one 
years of age. 

" It was Jackson's habit," says Mr. Samuel T. Pickard, 
in that prince of publications — The Youth? s Compan- 
ion — " to carry in his saddle-bags a copy of ' Bacon's 
Abridgment,' and to make frequent appeals to it in his 
cases. This precious book was always carefully done up 
in coarse brown paper, such as grocers used before the 
neat paper-bags of the present day were invented. The 



BENCH AND BAR. 215 

unwrapping of this much-prized volume before a court 
was a very solemn function, as performed by Jackson. 

" Avery, uncommonly fond of a joke, procured a piece 
of bacon, just the size of the book, and, while Jackson 
was addressing the court, slipped out the volume from 
its wrapping and substituted the bacon. While still ad- 
dressing the court, Jackson raised the flap of his saddle- 
bags, drew out the brown paper package, carefully untied 
the string, unfolded the paper with the decorous gravity 
of a priest handling the holy things of the altar, and 
then, without looking at what he held in his hand, ex- 
claimed triumphantly: 

" ' We will now see what Bacon says.' 

"The court, bar, jury and spectators were convulsed with 
laughter before Jackson saw the trick that had been 
played on him. Of course he was furious. He snatched 
a pen, and on the blank leaf of a law-book wrote a per- 
emptory clallenge, which he delivered then and there. 
He asked for no apology — nothing but blood would do. 
He commanded Avery to select a friend and arrange for 
a meeting at once. Avery made no answer to this per- 
emptory demand, thinking his peppery antagonist would 
laugh rather than fight, as he grew cooler. But he did 
not know the young man. Jackson grew hotter instead 
of cooler. Next morning he sent this note : 

"< August 12, 1788. 

" ' Sir: When a man's feelings and character are injured, 
he ought to seek a speedy redress. You received a few 
lines from me yesterday, and undoubtedly you understand 
me. My character you have injured ; and further, you 
have insulted me in the presence of the court and a large 
audience. I therefore call upon you as a gentleman to 
give me satisfaction for the same. And I further call 
upon you to give me an answer immediately without 



246 WIT AND HUMOR. 

equivocation, and I hope you can do without dinner until 
the business is done ; for it is consistent with the char- 
acter of a gentleman when he injures another to make a 
speedy reparation. Therefore I hope you will not fail in 
meeting me this day. From your obt. St., 

"' Andrew Jackson. 
"'P. S.: This evening after court adjourns.' 
" The challenge was accepted ; and in the dusk of the 
summer evening the duel came off in the presence of the 
same crowd that had laughed in the court room. "When 
the word was given, Jackson fired, his ball flicking Avery's 
ear, scratching it slightly. Now was Avery's chance to 
change the later history of his country, but his Puritan 
blood asserted itself. He fired in the air, then advanced 
and offered Jackson his hand, which was accepted." 

When Jackson was President of the United States he 
could tell an honest man from a rogue when he first saw 
him. A clergyman, with a stiff white choker and an un- 
tarnished suit of black, called on him one morning, and 
requested an appointment to some office, saying: 

" General, I worked harder for your election than many 
of those upon whom you have bestowed office." 

" You are a minister of the gospel ? " said Jackson, in- 
quiringly. 

" Yes," said the clergyman, " I was a minister, but I 
thought I could do better by becoming a politician; so I 
stumped the district week days for you, and preached for 
the Lord on Sundays." 

Jackson, turning short towards him, and looking him 
full in the face, said : 

" If you would cheat the Lord, you would cheat the 
country. I will have nothing to do with you, nor any 
like you. Good morning." 



V 



BENCH AND BAR. 247 

Jackson was once making a stump speech in a small 
village out west. Just as he was finishing, Amos Ken- 
dall, who sat near him, whispered, " Tip 'em a little Latin, 
General; they won't be contented without it." The man 
of the iron will instantly thought upon the few phrases he 
knew, and in a voice of thunder wound up with Epluri- 
bus unum, sine qua non, ne plus ultra, multum in parvo. 
The effect was tremendous, and the shouts of the Hoosiers 
could be heard for miles. ' 

A story of true courage conquering audacity is told of 
Jackson. When he was holding court in a small settle- 
ment, a desperado came into the court room with brutal 
violence and interrupted its proceedings. The judge or- 
dered him to be removed. Being a desperate man, and 
armed to the teeth, the officer hesitated to arrest him. 

" Call a posse," said the judge, " and arrest him." 

But those called shrank from attacking the ruffian. 

" Call me, then," said Jackson. " This court is ad- 
journed for five minutes ; " and going directly to the man, 
Jackson ordered him to drop his weapons, which, after a 
moment's doubt, he did. The ruffian afterwards said: 
" There was something in the judge's eye that I could 
not resist." 

Our Federal Union: it must be preserved. 

Jimmy O'Eeil, porter at the White House during Pres- 
ident Jackson's term, was a marked character. He had 
foibles, which were offensive to the fastidiousness of Col. 
Donelson, and caused his dismissal on an average about 
once a week. But on appeal to the higher court, the 
verdict was invariably reversed by the good nature of the 
old General. Once, however, Jimmy was guilty of some 
flagrant offence and was summoned before the highest 



248 WIT AND HUMOR. 

tribunal at once. The General, after stating the details 
of the misdeed, observed: 

"Jimmy, I have borne with you for years in spite of all 
complaints; but in this act you have gone beyond my 
power of endurance." 

" And do you believe the story ? " asked Jimmy. 

" Certainty," answered the General ; " I have just heard 
it from two Senators." 

" Faith," replied Jimmy, "if I balieved all that twenty 
Senators said about you, it's little I'd think you fit to be 
President." 

" O, pshaw ! Jimmy," concluded the President, " clear 
out and go on duty, but be more careful hereafter." 

Jimmy remained with his kindhearted patron, not only 
to the close of his presidential term, but, accompanying 
him to the Hermitage, was with him to the day of his 
death. 

When Mr. McLane was Secretary of State, a new min- 
ister arrived from Lisbon, and a day was appointed for 
him to be presented to President Jackson. The hour was 
set, and Mr. McLane expected the minister to be at the 
State Department, but the Portuguese had misunderstood 
Mr. McLane's French, and he proceeded alone to the White 
House. He rang the bell, and the door was opened by 
the Irish porter, Jimmy O'Neil. 

"Je suis venu voir Monsieur le President" said the 
minister. 

"What the deuce does he mean?" muttered Jimmy. 
" He says President, though, and I suppose he wants to 
see the General." 

" Oui, oui," said the Portuguese, bowing. 

Jimmy ushered him into the green room, where the 
General was smoking his corn-cob pipe with great com- 
posure. The minister made his bow to the President, and 



BENCH AND BAR. 249 

addressed him in French, of which the General did not 
understand a word. 

" What does the fellow say, Jimmy ? " 

" De'il know, sir. I reckon he's a f urriner." 

" Try him in Irish, Jimmy," said Old Hickory. 

Jimmy gave him a touch of the genuine Milesian, but 
the minister only shrugged his shoulders with the usual 
" Plait UP 

" Och ! " exclaimed Jimmy, " He can't go the Irish, sir. 
He's French, to be sure." 

" Send for the French cook and let him try if he can 
find out what the gentleman wants." 

The cook was hurried from the kitchen, sleeves rolled 
up, apron on, and the carving knife in his hand. The 
minister seeing this formidable apparition, and doubting 
he was in the presence of the head of the nation, feared 
some treachery, and made for the door, before which 
Jimmy planted himself to keep him in. "W hen the cook, 
by the General's order, asked who he was and what he 
wanted, and he gave a subdued answer, the President 
discovered his character. At this juncture Mr. McLane 
came in, and the minister was presented in clue form. 

When asked in his last illness by Dr. Edgar what he 
would have done had Calhoun and his followers persisted 
in their attempt at nullification, Jackson replied : " Hung 
them, sir, as high as Haman ! They should have been a 
terror to traitors for all time, and posterity would have 
pronounced it the best act of my life." "As he said these 
words," says Parton, his biographer, "he half rose in bed, 
and all the old fire glowed in his eyes again." 

Jackson, John J. — By dilatory movements of some 
of the lawyers in his district, the trial-list of Judge Jack- 
son, of the United States District Court of West Virginia, 



250 WIT AND HUMOR. 

became so clogged with old cases that he announced his 
purpose to clear the docket of all its driftwood. The 
result was the exhibition of much humor. 

In one case the judge asked a prominent attorney, 
"Whom do you represent?" 

"I don't remember; somebody who wants to collect 
money, I am sure." Stricken from the docket. 

In another proceeding he inquired, " Is there anything 
left in this case that the lawyers haven't got? " 

" Yes, sir, there is ; and they should be allowed a chance 
to get it." Stricken from the docket. 

To another attorney he remarked, "You seem to have 
inherited this case." 

" I am willing to renounce the inheritance," replied 
the counsel. 

" He wants to escape the inheritance tax," said a brother 
attorney, in an undertone. Stricken from the docket. 

Jeffrey, Francis. — One day Lord Cockburn went into 
the Second Division of the Court of Session, but came out 
again very hurriedly, meeting Lord Jeffrey at the door. 

" Do you see any paleness about my face, Jeffrey ? " 
asked Cockburn. 

" No," replied Jeffrey. i I hope you're well enough ? " 

" I don't know," said the other; " but I have just heard 
Bolus (Lord Chief Justice Boyle) say: 'I for one am of 
opinion that this case is founded on the fundamental basis 
of a quadrilateral contract, the four sides of which are 
agglutinated by adhesion ! ' " 

" I think, Cockburn," said Jeffrey, " that you had bet- 
ter go home." 

Eo one minds what Jeffrey says, — it is not more than 
a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the 
equator. — Sydney Smith. 



BENCH AND BAR. 251 

Jeffreys, George. — Judge Jeffreys having oeen told 
that William of Orange would shortly land, and that the 
prince's manifesto was already written, some one inquired : 

" Pray, my Lord Chief Justice, what do you think will 
be the heads of this manifesto ? " 

" Mine will be one," was the grim reply. 

An amusing instance from the State Trials in Jeffreys' 
time shows the temper and rudeness of the bench. Jef- 
freys being Chief Justice, a stormy conversation took place 
between, him and Mr. Ward (Lord Chief Baron in the 
reign of King William) during an action against an ex- 
sheriff for arresting the Lord Mayor. The case of Pil- 
kington, convicted of a riot, was the occasion of the out- 
break. Ward was coloring this transaction by calling it 
a matter of right and election. 

" No, Mr. Ward," said Jeffreys, " that was not the ques- 
tion determined there." 

" My lord, I humbly conceive the issue of that cause 
did determine the question." 

" No, no ! I tell you it was not the question." 

" I must submit it to your lordship." 

Finding that he had a tame counsel and a clear stage, 
the Chief Justice expressed his customary coarseness : " I 
perceive you do not understand the question that was 
then, nor the question that is now. You have made a 
long speech here, and nothing to the purpose. You do- 
not understand what you are about. 1 tell you it was no 
such question. No; it was not the question. But the 
defendants there were tried for a notorious offence, and 
a disorderly tumultuous assembly. Do not make such 
excursions ad cwptcmdum populum, with your flourishes ; 
I will none of your enamel, nor your garniture." 

"Will your lordship please to hear me?" 

" If you would speak to the purpose, come to the ques- 



252 WIT AND HUMOR 

tion, man ! T see you do not understand what you are 
about." 

"My lord!" 

"Nay, be as angry as you will, Mr. Ward." 

Then a little hiss besran. 

"Who is that?" said Jeffreys. "I hope we are now 
past that time of day that humming and hissing shall be 
used in courts of justice; but I would fain know that 
fellow that dares to hum and hiss while I sit here; I as- 
sure him, be he who he will, I'll lay him by the heels and 
make an example of him. Indeed, I knew the time when 
causes were to be carried according as the mobile hissed 
or hummed, and I do not question that they have as good 
a will to it now." 

The humming must have perplexed Jeffreys, because it 
was used as a mark of approbation in conventicles. But 
the hissing was clear enough, and the remembrance of 
the conventicle, in union with that noise, was too much 
for the irritable judge. 

"Come, Mr. Ward," he continued, "let us have none of 
your fragrancies and fine rhetorical flowers, to take the 
people with." 

He was, however, a sufferer from acute pain, which he 
strove to control by an outburst of impatience towards 
the first who fell in his way; but, in the midst, there 
was a layer of cunning, which he was ever ready to 
apply at any cost, so that he might remain master of the 
field. Whilst, then, he was blustering, and Ward civil, 
the learned Sir John Maynard arose with dignity, and 
stated calmly to the bench the state of the law upon the 
subject. That law Jeffreys adopted and made his own on 
the spot. 

In badgering a witness with noisy derision, no barrister 
of his time could surpass Jeffreys; but on more than one 



BENCH AND BAR. 253 

occasion he met his master in the witness whom he meant 
to brow-beat. 

" You fellow in the leathern doublet/' said Jeffreys to 
a countryman whom he was about to cross-examine, 
"pray what are you paid for swearing?" 

" God bless you, sir, and make you an honest man," an- 
swered the witness, looking Jeffreys full in the face, and 
speaking with a voice of hearty good humor; " if you had 
no more for lying than I have for swearing, you would 
wear a leather doublet as well as I." 

Jekyll, Joseph. — Jekyll was a celebrated lawyer and 
statesman in the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. In 
his will he left his fortune to pay off the national debt. 
"When Lord Mansfield heard of this he said: 

" Sir Joseph was a very good man and a very good 
lawyer, but his bequest was a very foolish one; he might 
as well have attempted to stop the water from flowing 
through the middle arch of Blackfriar's Bridge with his 
full-bottomed wig ! " 

One of Jekyll's bright sayings was: " The farther I go 
west, the more convinced I am that the wise men came 
from the east." 

Of Lady Cork, the friend of Dr. Johnson and the lit- 
erati, who wore an enormous plume at one of her recep- 
tions, Jekyll said she was " exactly a shuttlecock, — all 
Cork and feathers." 

One day in his chambers, Jekyll, observing a squirrel 
playing tread-mill in a wire cylinder, exclaimed : " Ah, 
poor devil, he is going the home circuit ! " 

Johnson, Andrew. — Just after Johnson had vacated 
the presidential seat, the managers of the Simpson County 



-254 WIT AND HUMOR 

(Ky.) Agricultural and Mechanical Association decided 
that it would be a great advertisement to have the old 
gentleman attend the fair. " We don't care for him on 
Saturday," said the manager, "for on that day we shall 
have a pretty big crowd anyhow. Wednesday will be 
the day. I will write to the ex-President." 

The following letter was sent to Mr. Johnson: " Great 
Sir: The people of the wonderful county of Simpson, 
feeling a great interest in one of America's most gifted 
sons, have decided to invite you to be present at our fair 
grounds on Wednesday, the 6th of October, where they 
wish to shake your hand. Please let me know by return 
mail." 

He let them know by return mail. The old gentleman 
turned the letter over and wrote the following: "I am 
A. Johnson " 

Judge, The Outside. — The good old judge who holds 
the judicial reins evenly — never becoming thirteenth in 
the jury-box nor counsel for either side — is gently de- 
scribed in "The Outside Judge: " 

You may sing of the judge, Common Pleas judge, 

Or any judge that you please; 
I go for the judge, the nice old judge, 

That knowingly takes his ease, 
And looking wise from behind the bench, 

At the rate of six thousand a year, 
Cares not a hair in his sound old head, 

Who goes to the front or rear. 

Not his is the borje they are righting for, 

And why should the judge sail in, 
"With nothing to gain, but a chance perhaps 

To lose in strife and chagrin. 
There may be a few, perhaps, who fail 

To see it quite in this light; 
But when the fur flies, I'd rather be 

The outside judge in the fight. 



BENCH AND BAR 255 

I know there are some — of judges I speak — 

Who think it is quite the thing 
To take the part of one in the fight, 

And hop right into the ring; 
But I care not a hair what any may say, 

In regard to the wrong or the right. 
My judgment goes, as well as my rhyme, 

For the judge that keeps out of the fight. 

—M.B. 

Jurors, Competency of.— The supreme court was 
in session in one of the lower counties of the circuit, and 
the district attorney, with the counsel for the defence, was 
engaged in the selection of a jury for the trial of a man 
charged with murder. As usual, in such cases, some dif- 
ficulty was experienced, and the court was getting tired 
of the tedious proceedings. 

"Call the next juror, Mr. Clerk," said the district at- 
torney for the hundredth time. 

The clerk called, and an old man, with an honest face 
and a suit of blue jean clothes, rose in his place, and the 
district attorney asked the following customary questions: 

" Have you, from having seen the crime committed, or 
having heard any of the evidence delivered under oath, 
formed or expressed an opinion as to the guilt or inno- 
cence of the prisoner at the bar ? " 

"No, sir." 

" Is there any bias or prejudice resting on your mind 
for or against the prisoner at the bar ? " 

"None, sir." 

" Is your mind perfectly impartial between the state 
and the accused ? " 

"It is." 

" Are you opposed to capital punishment ? n 

"lam not." 

All the questions had been answered, and the court was 



256 WIT AND HUMOR. 

congratulating itself on having another juror, wnen the 
district attorney, in solemn tones, said : 

"Juror, look upon the prisoner; prisoner, look upon 
the juror." 

The old man adjusted his spectacles and peeringly gazed 
at the prisoner for Ml half a minute, when he turned his 
eyes toward the court and earnestly said: 

" Judge, I'll be condemned if I don't believe he's guilty." 

The court was considerably exasperated at having lost 
a juror, but the more humorously inclined had a good 
laugh at the old man's premature candor. 

" Have you conscientious scruples against serving as a 
juror where the penalty is death ? " said the attorney to 
a Boston talesman. 

" I have." 

" What is your objection ? " 

" I do not desire to die." 

Questions alternately by the court, the state's attor- 
ney, and the defence, as answered by an intelligent juror 
in a Western murder case : 

" Are you opposed to capital punishment ? " 

"Oh, yes — yes, sir." 

" If you were on a jury, where a man was being tried 
for his life, you wouldn't agree to a verdict to hang him ? " 

"Yes, sir — yes, I would." 

" Have you formed or expressed an opinion as to the 
guilt or innocence of the accused ? " 

"Yes, sir." 

" Your mind, then, is made up ? " 

"Oh, no — no, it ain't." 

" Have you any bias for or against the prisoner ? " 

"I think I have." 

" Are you prejudiced ? " 






BENCH AND BAR. 257 

" Oh, no, not a bit." 

" Have you ever heard of this case ? " 

" I think I have." 

" Would you decide, if on the jury, according to the evi- 
dence or mere rumor ? " 

"Mere rumor." 

" Perhaps you don't understand; would you decide ac- 
cording to evidence ? " 

" Evidence." 

" If it was in your power to do so, would you change 
the law of capital punishment or let it stand ? " 

" Let it stand." 

The Court : " Would you let it stand or change it ? " 

" Change it." 

"Now, which would you do?" 

" I don't know, sir." 

" Are you a freeholder ? " 

" Yes, sir." 

" Do you own a house and land, or rent ? " 

"Neither — I am a boarder." 

"Have you formed an opinion?" 

" No, sir." 

" Have you expressed an opinion ? " 

"Think I have." 

The Court : " Gentlemen, I think the juror is competent. 
It is very evident he has never formed or expressed an 
opinion on the subject." 

Eminent Advocate (to possible juror): " Do you enter- 
tain any conscientious scruples against the infliction of 
capital punishment?" 

Possible Juror (confidently): "John Smith, sixty-two 
years old last grass, thank ye." 

Advocate (wrathfully): " I did not ask your name." 
17 



258 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Possible Juror (cheerfully): "No, sir; hain't read 
nuthin' about the case." 

Advocate (roaring): "Are you deaf or a fool?" 

Possible Juror: "You'll haf to speak a little loader. 
I'm kinder hard of hearin'." 

Advocate : "Accepted." 

Jury, on the. — We look back with mingled mirth and 
indignation to the troubles of the jury appointed to try 
William Penn and his co-mate in adversity, William 
Mead. 

This jury, having given a verdict which did not suit 
the judge, and refusing to alter it upon his direction, were 
shut up without fire or food, and left to reconsider the 
case. Brought before the court the following morning, 
they continued firm in their former decision, whereupon 
the Recorder, John Howell, having threatened to have 
them carted about the city, while the Lord Mayor ex- 
pressed bloodthirsty desires regarding the noses and 
throats of the obstinate jurors, they were again confined 
until the following morning. 

This treatment failed to induce them to alter their ver- 
dict, and the judge therefore, deeming stronger measures 
necessary, fined each of the jurymen forty, marks, and 
sentenced them to be imprisoned until the fines were 
paid ; while the prisoners, who had been found " not 
guilty," were also fined for contempt of court. 

Both prisoners and jurymen were conveyed to New- 
gate. From this retreat the jurymen sued out a writ 
of habeas corpus, and the case being shortly afterwards 
tried before twelve judges in the superior court, it was 
ruled, after a solemn argument, that the refusal of the 
jury to reverse the verdict on the order of the judge was 
insufficient cause for fining and committing them to prison. 






BENCH AND BAE. 259 

They were accordingly discharged and brought civil ac- 
tions for damages, with, we hope, satisfactory results. 

The confinement of a jury without food or light, as in 
the case just mentioned, was a common practice. 

In a trial which took place during the reign of Eliza- 
beth, the jury disagreed, and were accordingly shut up. 
They remained in their confinement so long, however, 
without coming to any definite conclusion, that strong 
suspicions were aroused in the breast of the judge, who 
ordered a search to be made. The court officials, card- 
ing out this order, discovered that some of the jurymen 
had supplies of figs, and others apples. 

It was not until the following day that the jury ar- 
rived at a verdict, and upon their appearance in court 
the discovery of the fruit was mentioned, and each jury- 
man examined on oath. Several of them confessed to 
having regaled themselves with figs, and were accordingly 
fined five pounds each. The others admitted being in 
possession of apples, but declared they had not partaken 
of them. 

Had either party to the suit supplied the jury with 
eatables, it would have rendered their verdict void, but in 
this case it was shown that the festivities in the jury-room 
had taken place at the expense of the jury themselves, 
and their decision was therefore allowed to have effect. 

In a case tried in 1758, a court official, in accordance 
with the general usage, refused to allow the jury candles 
to throw light upon their deliberations. Lord Mansfield, 
however, having asked both parties to the suit it' they 
objected to the jurymen having lights, and receiving an- 
swers in the negative, departed from the ancient custom. 

In addressing the grand jury, the judge generally in- 
dulges in a long and careful speech, expository of their 
duties, together with a preliminary skirmish with the 



> 



260 WIT AND HUMOR 

salient points of the principal cases about to be tried 
To Judge Foster belongs the honor of having given the 
shortest charge upon record. 

The day was terribly hot, and the judge, taking his 
seat upon the bench, after carefully mopping his brow, 
turned to the jury and delivered the following oration: 

" Gentlemen, the weather is extremely hot, I am very 
old, and you are very well acquainted with what is your 
duty. I have no doubt you will practice it." 

It being the custom at that period for the jurymen to 
stand the whole time the judge was addressing them, we 
have no doubt that the jury in question were extremely 
pleased, if not enlightened. All jurors were not so lucky, 
especially those whose fate it was to be called upon to 
serve in the cases presided over by Lord Eskgrove. 

While some judges did not always insist upon the due 
observance of this " standing " rule, Lord Eskgrove was 
remarkable for the fact that upon no occasion would he 
permit it to be disregarded. He was also remarkable for 
his tediousness, and certain speeches referred to by Lord 
Cockburn afford a contrast to the preceding. He says: 

" Often have I gone back to the court at midnight and 
found him whom I had left mumbling hours before, still 
talking on to the smoky tallow candles in greasy tin 
candlesticks, and the poor desponding jurymen ; while the 
other portion of his audience were asleep, the wagging 
of his lordship's nose and chin being the chief sign that 
he was still charging." 

" An' how do yez loik bein' on th' jury, Patrick ? " 

" It's some-at confinin', Bridget." 

" An' is it harrucl work ? " 

" Well, it's aisy enough decidin' phich soid is roight 
phin only wan is Oinsh ; but it's harrud worruk decidin' 
phin both soids is Oirish." 



BENCH AND BAR 261 

An amusing scene occurred at one of the assizes be- 
tween Baron Holland, presiding judge, and a farmer who 
had been summoned as a juryman. The farmer claimed 
exemption from the duties of a juror on the ground that 
he was deaf. 

" Are you very deaf ? " inquired his lordship, raising 
his voice, and addressing the farmer, who stood up at the 
time in the witness-box. 

The farmer was silent. 

" He does not hear your lordship," observed one of the 
officers of the court. 

" Are you very deaf?" repeated the judge, shouting as 
loudly as his lungs would permit. 

" Werry, please your lordship." 

" Are you deaf in both ears ? " asked the judge. 

" Did your lordship speak ? " inquired the farmer, look- 
ing at the judge with an irresistibly droll expression of 
countenance. 

" I asked you whether you were deaf in both ears," re- 
plied his lordship, again speaking at the full stretch of 
his voice. 

" I can hear a little with one ear, my lord, when I turns 
about the side of my head to the person speaking." 

" Oh, in that case," said the judge, speaking in a very 
low tone of voice, " we must exempt you ; for jurors mast 
have two ears — one for the prosecutor, and the other 
for the prisoner. You may go." 

The farmer nodded thanks to the court, and was in the 
act of descending from the witness-box, when his lord- 
ship observed, again speaking in a low tone of voice, 
" Oh, you hear that, do you ? P 

" Oh, yez, my lord, I hears that," answered the farmer, 
with infinite dryness of manner. 

" With both ears, I dare say," added his lordship. 



262 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" Oh, yez, with both on 'em," replied the farmer, amidst 
deafening shouts of laughter, in which Lis lordship heart- 
ily joined. 

At the conclusion of a nuisance case the judge, after a 
tedious charge, said to the jury: 

" I hope you understand the various points I have sub- 
mitted to you. 

" Oh, yes," said the foreman, " we never knew what a 
nuisance was until we heard your honor's summing up." 

One of the most sacred and cherished of English insti- 
tutions is that of trial by jury, but in connection there- 
with many curious and amusing incidents can be recorded. 
Early in the present century an attorney who filled the 
high office of sheriff, and who was somewhat of a wit, 
brought together a petty jury of twelve of the fattest 
men he could find. When they came to the book to be 
sworn, it appeared that only nine jurors could sit com- 
fortably in the box. The court was puzzled what to do; 
but after a good deal of laughing and not a little squeez- 
ing and protesting on the part of the twelve "good men 
and true," they managed to wedge themselves in. Liter- 
ally they were a " packed jury." 

The learned recorder who presided requested that there 
should be no more " fat panels " summoned to his court. 
The facetious high sheriff bowed acquiescence; but, de- 
termined to have his little joke, summoned on the next 
occasion twelve of the leanest and tallest men that the 
county could produce. The droll effect — there being 
room in the box for twelve more jurors of the same di- 
mensions — moved the court to mirth, and it was some 
time before the administration of justice could be pro- 
ceeded with. 

At another time the same humorous official impaneled 






BENCH AND BAR 263 

a jury of barbers ; but the crowning joke occurred at the 
summoning of his fourth and last jury. For that term 
of the court the high sheriff, not having the fear of the 
recorder before his eyes, actually brought together a 
squinting jury. When these twelve queer-looking jurors 
came to be sworn, the court could no longer maintain its 
gravity, and recorder, mayor, alderman and barristers 
gave themselves up to uncontrollable laughter. 

Lord Hannen was known as a stern ruler of his court ; 
no man dared take a liberty with him, and he was never 
known to be hoaxed but on one occasion. A juryman 
dressed in deep mourning, serious and downcast, stood 
up and claimed exemption from service on that day, as 
he was deeply interested in the funeral of a gentleman, at 
which it was his desire to be present. 

" Oh, certainly," was the courteous reply of the judge, 
and the sad man went. 

"My lord," interposed the clerk, as soon as the ex- 
juryman had gone, "do you know who that man is that 
you exempted?" 

"JSTo." 

" He is an undertaker." 

A judge, noted for his tendency to explain things to 
juries, expressed himself so forcibly in a case that he was 
surprised the jurors thought of leaving the box. They 
did leave, however, and were out for hours. Inquiring 
the trouble, he was told that one of the twelve was stand- 
ing out against the eleven. He summoned the jury and 
rebuked the recalcitrant sharply. 

" Your honor," said the juror, " may I say a word ? " 

" Yes, sir," said the indignant judge ; " what have you 
to say?" 

" Well, what I wanted to say is, I'm the only fellow 
that's on your side." 



264 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Jury System, Defects in the. — " Speakin' about the 
jury system," said old Uncle Huckleblossom, raising his 
voice above the sizzling of the tobacco spit on the glow- 
ing side of the grocery-store stove, " speakin' about the 
jury system, I reckon 't I know as much about the jury 
system as the next un." 

" In the fall of ninety-seven," the old gentleman con- 
tinued reminiscently, while the audience rendered him 
respectful attention, "I bort a cow o' neighbor Titus — 
you 'member her, Silas — brindle sort o' cow 'ith one horn 
kinder bent back'ards, like 'twas tryin' ter scratch 'tween 
her shoulders. I paid Titus part down, 'n fer balance I 
give 'im my note. "Well, things kinder strung along and 
strung along, 'n bimeby Titus lowed ez how he reckoned 
't mebbe I'd better be a payin' sumpthin' on the note. I 
stood him off 'n one sorter way 'n 'nother, ez you under- 
stand, 'n then the cow up 'n died — she'd been a measly 
thing f'm the start, anyhow, 'n I alius c'nsiclered 't Titus 
cheated me in thet trade. So I warn't no ways anxious 
t' pay the note, 'n w'n Titus come a-sweatin' round, I jus' 
leaned back comf 'table like 'n let 'im sweat. Then he up 
'n sued me. 

" Sued me ! " the old man repeated, sweeping the com- 
pany with a look of ineffable indignation : " sued — me ! " 
"Well, I sez, 'f thetfs his game, let 'im sue. Tell y'u 
w'at — I was mad. So Titus he hired a loryer 'n I hired 
un, too, 'n' the case come on. I was c'nsider'ble techy on 
the matter o' the jury. There they sot in ther' cheers, 
an' or'nary lookin' set o' men enough. Looked a little 
stoopid, p'r'aps, but mebbe thet was only 'cause they was 
thinkin'. But w'en my loryer got up 'n argyfied away 
at 'em — bless y'u, y'u never see sech a nintellergunt 
'pearin' lot o' men. They jes' seemed t' glisten 'ith in- 
tellergunce. My loryer hed 'em wound 'n' wound aroun' 



BENCH AND BAR. 265 

Is finger — I could see thet — 'n' I couldn't help smilin' 
all over inside, V w'en I glanced aroun' at Titus — you 
never see sech a sick lookin' man ez Titus was ! Jes' green 
'ith sickness. Wen my loryer sot down I couldn't help 
pokin' 'im in the rib 'n' chucklin' a little over Titus. Only 
thing I was sorry for was 't the jury couldn't speak ther 
minds then V there, 'n' not trouble t' be bored 'ith Titus's 
loryer. 

" Well, up gits Titus's loryer after a spell, 'n' the way 
he walked inter me was scand'lous. Called me every- 
thing — the miser'ble, little, conceited, half-starved w'elp ! 
^F 't 'ad n't ben f r my being' sartin' of the jury, V right 
there in court, too, I dunno but I'd a riz right up 'n' squat 
that miser'ble, little, low-down, sneakin', starvin' petti- 
fooler thet didn't hev brains enough t' do nothin' more'n 
jus' call names. 

" Bimeby I looked up 't the jury, but I could see the 
sneakin' little loryer warn't makin' no 'mpression on them. 
So I sut back in my cheer, 'n' let 'im soak. I didn't keer 
w'at he sed 'bout me. I reckon 't people around here 
know me. 

" Then the jedge talked a bit — give 'em the lor'n' all 
thet, y' understand, 'n' then the jury went out. Bimeby 
they come ag'in, 'n' the foreman give in the verdict. 9 W 
who do y'u s'pose they found for — me or Titus?" the 
old man asked, gazing about on the listening group for a 
reply. 

" For you, Uncle Huckleblossom, of course," piped a 
ten or- voiced man who sat on the cracker barrel. 

The old gentleman withered the tenor- voiced man with 
a look. 

" That's all a fool knows about sech matters, anyway," 
he testily snorted. " They found for Titus, 'n' I hed t' 
shoulder the costs inter the bargain. The jury system ! 



266 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Wy, it's the worst V most deceivin' thing about this 
whole government." 

And then there was a long, long silence, which was 
broken only by the smell of a cow-hide boot that got too 
near the red-hot stove. 

Karnes, Lord. — "Tickle him yourself, Harry; you 
are as able to do it as I am," said Lord Kames, interrupt- 
ing, amid general laughter, the beginning of Erskine's 
speech for one Tickle : 

"Tickle, my client, the defendant, my lord." 

Kames, when a circuit judge, was out walking in a 
Scotch town. He lost his way, and asked a man to help 
him out of the dilemma. 

" That I will," answered the man, with much cordiality. 
" Does your lordship remember me ? My name is John 

. I have had the honor to be before your lordship 

for stealing sheep." 

" John, I remember you well. How is your wife ? She 
had the honor to be before me, too, for receiving them r 
knowing they were stolen." 

" At your lordship's service. We were very lucky, and 
got off for want of evidence, and are still going on in the 
butcher trade." 

" Then," replied Kames, " we may have the honor of 
meeting again." 

Kelley, William D. — A young woman, the daugh- 
ter of an old Pennsylvanian who had been one of Judge 
Kelley's political lieutenants, applied to him for a posi- 
tion which he promised to secure for her the next day. 
On the following morning, when the young woman called 
on the judge, he had forgotten all about her case, but, 
upon being reminded, apologized profusely, and told her 



BENCH AND BAR, 26T 

to " call to-morrow." The judge kept this up for nearly 
a month, when the young woman lost her patience. On 
the occasion of her last visit, the judge, who was very 
absent-minded, did not catch her name as the servant an- 
nounced her presence in the parlor, and, walking hur- 
riedly into the room, shook hands with her and began 
the old formula : 

" My dear young lady, I am very busy to-day; you will 
really have to call to-morrow." 

"But, judge," she protested, " that is what you have told 
me for a month. I have come almost every day, and 
you have invariably told me to ' call to-morrow.' " 

" I beg your pardon, I am sure," said the judge, with 
great suavity. " Call day after to-morrow." 

Kenyon, Lord. — " Pray, my lord," asked a fashion- 
able lady of Lord Kenyon, " what do you think my son 
had better do to succeed in the law ? " 

" Let him spend all his money, marry a rich wife and 
spend all hers, and when he hasn't a shilling in the world,, 
let him attack the law." 

Once, when sitting in the Eolls Court, indignant be- 
yond measure at the conduct of one of the parties, Ken- 
yon astonished his staid and prosaical audience by ex- 
claiming : 

" This is the last hair in the tail of procrastination." 

Kenyon's penuriousness was proverbial and increased 
with advancing years. He ceased to invite even old 
friends to his table, and his household servants complained 
that they were required to put up with the same fare their 
master set for himself. 

" In Lord Kenyon's house," a wit exclaimed, " all the 
year through it is Lent in the kitchen, and Passion Week 
in the parlor." 



268 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Another caustic critic remarked: 

" In his lordship's kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits 
are always bright." 

Whereupon Jekyll testily replied : 

" Spits ! In the name of common sense don't talk about 
his spits, for nothing turns upon them.'* 

Keogh, William. — The late Justice Keogh, of Ire- 
land, was afflicted with an unpleasant failing of memory. 
On the occasion of a " Bar dinner " at his house he went 
upstairs to dress, but did not reappear. The company sat 
patiently for some time, till at length — just as their 
hunger was getting the better of their manners, and an 
emissary was being despatched to hunt up the missing 
judge — his lordship appeared, and explained with many 
apologies that, imagining he was retiring for the night, 
he had undressed and got into bed. After an hour's sleep 
he awoke, when it suddenly struck him that he had not 
yet dined, on which he hurried clown to his guests. 

He once attended a representation of " Macbeth " in the 
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. It will be remembered that the 
witches, in reply to the Thane's inquiry what they were 
doing, declared they were doing " A deed without a name." 
Catching the sound of the words, and no doubt imagining 
he was on the bench in the Four Courts, Keogh exclaimed, 
to the astonishment of the audience, " A deed without a 
name ! Why, it's not worth sixpence ! " 

Keogh's absent-mindedness recalls a story related of 
Peter Burrowes, a celebrated Irish barrister. A friend 
calling upon Burrowes one morning in his dressing room, 
found him shaving himself with his face to the wall, and 
asked him why he chose so strange an attitude. The 
answer was, " To look in the glass." " Why, there is no 



BENCH AND BAR 269 

glass there," said the friend. "Bless you !" exclaimed 
Burrowes, " I did not notice that before." Then ringing 
the bell, he called the servant and questioned him re- 
specting the looking-glass which had been hanging on 
the wall. " Oh, sir," said the servant, " it was broken 
six weeks a^o." 



"O 



Knott, J. Proctor. — Knott, attorney-general of Mis- 
souri, and later member of Congress from Kentucky, 
won national reputation as a humorist by several brill- 
iant speeches in Congress — his one on " Duluth " being 
a gem. It was delivered in 1871, on a bill extending the 
time for the construction of a railroad from the St. Croix 
river to Duluth, Minnesota, and to Bayfield, Wisconsin, — 
the former grant of 1,418,451 acres of public lands to the 
construction company having lapsed by the failure to 
build the line within five years. The extension bill 
passed the Senate, but was defeated in the House, after 
the exposure of extravagant land grants already made, 
and after Knott had riddled and ridiculed the measure in 
the speech referred to: 

" Mr. Speaker : If I could be actuated by any conceiv- 
able inducement to betray the sacred trust reposed in me 
by those to whose generous confidence I am indebted for 
the honor of a seat on this floor; if I could be influenced 
by any possible consideration to become instrumental in 
giving away, in violation of their known wishes, any por- 
tion of their interest in the public domain for the mere 
promotion of any railroad enterprise whatever, I should 
certainly feel a strong inclination to give this measure my 
most earnest and hearty support; for I am assured that its 
success would materially enhance the pecuniary prosperity 
of some of the most valued friends I have on earth; 
friends for whose accommodation I would be willing to 



-270 WIT AND HUMOR. 

make almost any sacrifice not involving my personal 
honor or my fidelity as the trustee of an express trust. 
And that fact of itself would be sufficient to countervail 
almost any objection I might entertain to the passage of 
this bill not inspired by an imperative and inexorable 
sense of public duty. 

" Now, sir, I have been satisfied for years that if there 
was any portion of the inhabited globe absolutely in a 
suffering condition for want of a railroad, it was these 
teeming pine barrens of the St. Croix. At what particu- 
lar point on that noble stream such a road should be com- 
menced I knew was immaterial, and so it seems to have 
been considered by the draughtsman of this bill. It might 
be up at the spring or down at the foot-log, or the water- 
gate, or the fish-clam, or anywhere along the bank, no 
matter where. But in what direction should it run, or 
where it should terminate, were always to my mind ques- 
tions of the most painful perplexity. I could conceive of 
no place on ' God's green earth ' in such straitened cir- 
cumstances for railroad facilities as to be likely to desire 
or willing to accept such a connection. I knew that 
neither Bayfield nor Superior City would have it, for 
they both indignantly spurned the munificence of the 
government when coupled with such ignominious condi- 
tions, and let this very same land grant die on their hands 
years and years ago rather than submit to the degrada- 
tion of a direct communication by railroad with the piney 
woods of the St. Croix; and I knew that what the enter- 
prising inhabitants of those giant young cities would re- 
fuse to take would have few charms for others, whatever 
their necessities or cupidity might be. 

" Hence, as I said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to deter- 
mine where the terminus of this great and indispensable 
road should be, until I accidentally overheard some gen- 



BENCH AND BAR. 271 

tleman the other day mention the name of 'Duluth.' 
Duluth ! The word fell upon my ear with peculiar and 
indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low 
fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft, 
sweet accents of an angel's whisper, in the bright, joyous 
dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth ! 'Twas the name 
for which my soul had panted for years, as the hart pant- 
eth for water-brooks. But where was Duluth ? Never, 
in all my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened 
by seeing the celestial word in print. And I felt a pro- 
founder humiliation in my ignorance, that its dulcet syl- 
lable had never before ravished my delighted ear. I was 
certain the draughtsman of this bill had never heard of 
it, or it would have been designated as one of the termini 
of this road. I asked my friends about it, but they knew 
nothing of it. I rushed to the library and examined all 
the maps I could find. I discovered in one of them a deli- 
cate, hair-like line, diverging from the Mississippi near a 
place marked Prescott, which I supposed was intended to 
represent the river St. Croix, but I could nowhere find 
Duluth. 

" Nevertheless, I was confident it existed somewhere, 
and that its discovery would constitute the crowning glory 
of the present century, if not of all modern times. I knew 
it was bound to exist in the very nature of things ; that 
the symmetry and perfection of our planetary system 
would be incomplete without it; that the elements of 
material nature would long since have resolved themselves 
back into original chaos if there had been such a hiatus 
in creation as would have resulted from leaving out Du- 
luth. In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the convic- 
tion that Duluth not only existed somewhere, but that 
wherever it was, it was a great and glorious place. I was 
convinced that the greatest calamity that ever befell the 



2Y2 WIT AND HUMOR. 



benighted nations of the ancient world was in their hav- 
ing passed away without a knowledge of the actual exist- 
ence of Duluth ; that their fabled Atlantis, never seen 
save by the hallowed vision of inspired poesy, was, in fact, 
but another name for Duluth ; that the golden orchard 
of the Hesperides was but a poetical synonym for the 
beer gardens in the vicinity of Duluth. I was certain 
that Herodotus had died a miserable death because in all 
his travels and with all his geographical research he had 
never heard of Duluth. I knew that if the immortal 
spirit of Homer could look down from another heaven 
than that created by his own celestial genius upon the 
long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to 
the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his 
magic wand, if he could be permitted to behold the vast 
assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric 
art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would 
weep tears of bitter anguish that instead of lavishing all 
the stories of his mighty genius upon the fall of Troy it 
had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in death- 
less song the rising glories of Duluth. Yet, sir, had it not 
been for this map, kindly furnished me by the legislature 
of Minnesota, I might have gone down to my obscure and 
humble grave in an agony of despair, because I could no- 
where find Duluth. Had such been my melancholy fate, 
I have no doubt that with the last feeble pulsation of my 
breaking heart, with the last faint exhalation of my fleet- 
ing breath, I should have whispered, ' Where is Duluth ? ' 
" But, thanks to the beneficence of that band of minis- 
tering angels who have their bright abodes in the far-off 
capital of Minnesota, just as the agony of my anxiety was 
about to culminate in the frenzy of despair, this blessed 
map was placed in my hands; and as I unfolded it a re- 
splendent scene of ineffable glory opened before me, such 



BENCH AND BAR. 273 

as I imagine burst upon the enraptured vision of the 
wandering peri through the opening gates of paradise. 
There, there for the first time my enchanted eyo rested 
upon the ravishing word ' Duiuth.' 

" This map, sir, is intended, as it appears from its title, 
to illustrate the position of Duiuth in the United States, 
but if gentlemen will examine it, I think they will con- 
cur with me in the opinion that it is far too modest in 
its pretensions. It not only illustrates the position of 
Duiuth in the United States, but exhibits its relations 
with all created things. It even goes further than this. 
It lifts the shadowy veil of futurity, and affords us a view 
of the golden prospects of Duiuth far along the dim vista 
of ages yet to come. 

" If gentlemen will examine it, they will find Duiuth 
not only in the center of the map, but represented in the 
center of a series of concentric circles one hundred miles 
apart, and some of them as much as four thousand miles 
in diameter, embracing alike in their tremendous sweep 
the fragrant savannas of the sunlit south, and the eternal 
solitudes of snow that mantle the ice-bound north. How 
these circles were produced is perhaps one of those pri- 
mordial rr^steries that the most skillful paleologist will 
never be able to explain. But the fact is, sir, Duiuth is 
pre-eminently a central place, for I am told by gentle- 
men who have been so reckless of their own personal 
safety as to venture away into those awful regions where 
Duiuth is supposed to be, that it is so exactly in the center 
of the visible universe that the sky comes down at pre- 
cisely the same distance all around it. 

" I find by reference to this map that Duiuth is situ- 
ated somewhere near the western end of Lake Superior, 
but as there is no dot or other mark indicating its exact 
location, I am unable to say whether it is actually con- 
18 



274 WIT AND HUMOR. 

fined to any particular spot, or whether 'it is just lying 
around there loose.' I really canuot tell whether it is 
one of those ethereal creations of intellectual frost-work, 
more intangible than the rose-tinted clouds of a summer 
sunset; one of those airy exhalations of the spectator's 
brain which I am told are ever flitting in the form of 
towns and cities along those lines of railroad built with 
government subsidies, luring the unwary settlers, as the 
mirage of the desert lures the famished traveler on, and 
ever on, until it fades away in the darkening horizon, or 
whether it is a real bona fide, substantial city, all 'staked 
off,' with the lots marked with their owner's name, like 
that proud commercial metropolis lately discovered on 
the desirable shores of San Domingo. But, however that 
may be, I am satisfied Duluth is there, or thereabouts; for 
I see it stated here on this map that it is exactly thirty- 
nine hundred and ninety miles from Liverpool, though I 
have no doubt, for the sake of convenience, it will be 
moved back ten miles, so as to make the distance an even 
four thousand. 

" Then, sir, there is the climate of Duluth, unquestion- 
ably the most salubrious and delightful to be found any- 
where on the Lord's earth. Now, I have always been 
under the impression, as I presume other gentlemen have, 
that in the region around Lake Superior it was cold 
enough for at least nine months in the year to freeze the 
smokestack off a locomotive. But I see it represented, on 
this map, that Duluth is situated exactly half way be- 
tween the latitudes of Paris and Venice, so that gentle- 
men who have inhaled the exhilarating i irs of the one or 
basked in the golden sunlight of the other must see at a 
glance that Duluth must be a place of untold delights, a 
terrestial paradise, fanned by the balmy zephyrs of an 
eternal spring, clothed in the gorgeous sheen of ever- 



BENCH AND BAR. 275 

blooming flowers, and vocal with the silvery melody of 
nature's choicest songsters. In fact, sir, since I have seen 
this map, I have no doubt that Byron was vainly endeav- 
oring to convey some faint conception of the delicious 
charms of Duluth when his poetic soul gushed forth in 
the rippling strains of that beautiful rhapsody: 

" ' Know ye the land of the cedar and vine, 

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine; 
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume. 
Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in her bloom : 
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit, 
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute; 
Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky, 
In color though varied, in beauty may vie.' 

" As to the commercial resources of Duluth, sir, they 
are simply illimitable and inexhaustible, as is shown by 
this map. I see it stated here that there is a vast scope 
of territory, embracing an area of over two milliou square 
miles, rich in every element of material wealth and com- 
mercial prosperity, all tributary to Duluth. Look at it, 
sir ! Here are inexhaustible mines of gold, immeasurable 
veins of silver, impenetrable depths of boundless forest, 
vast coal-measures, wide, extended plains of richest past- 
urage, all — all embraced in the vast territory which must, 
in the very nature of things, empty the untold treasures 
of its commerce into the lap of Duluth. 

" Sir, I might stand here for hours and hours and ex- 
patiate with rapture on the gorgeous prospects of Duluth, 
as depicted upon this map. But human life is too short, 
and the time of this House far too valuable, to allow me 
to linger longer upon the delightful theme. I think every 
gentleman on this floor is as well satisfied as I am that 
Duluth is destined to become the commercial metropolis 
of the universe, and that this road should be built at once. 
I am fully persuaded that no patriotic representative of 



276 WIT AND HUMOR, 

the American people who has a proper appreciation of the 
associated glories of Duluth and the St. Croix will hes- 
itate a moment to say that every able-bodied female in 
the land, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, 
who is in favor of ' women's rights,' should be drafted and 
set to work upon this great work without delay. Never- 
theless, sir, it grieves my very soul to be compelled to say 
that I cannot vote for the grant of lands provided for in 
this bill. 

" Ah, sir ! you can have no conception of the poignancy 
of my anguish that I am deprived of that blessed privi- 
lege ! There are two insuperable obstacles in the way. 
In the first place my constituents, for whom I am acting 
here, have no more interest in this road than they have 
in the great question of culinary taste, now perhaps agi- 
tating the public mind of Dominica, as to whether the 
illustrious commissioners who recently left this capital 
for that free and enlightened republic would be better 
fricasseed, boiled or roasted; and in the second place, 
these lands which I am asked to give away, alas, are not 
mine to bestow ! My relation to them is simply that of 
trustee to an express trust. And shall I ever betray that 
trust? Never, sir! Rather perish Duluth! Perish the 
paragon of cities ! Rather let the freezing cyclone of the 
bleak northwest bury it forever beneath the eddying 
sands of the raging St. Croix." 

Knott and a distinguished professional gentleman of 
Danville, Kentucky, were discussing the claims of Samp- 
son and Schley to the credit of smashing Cervera at 
Santiago. The professional gentleman took the ground 
that all the honor of that memorable conflict belonged 
to Admiral Sampson, and was inclined to ignore entirely 
Commodore Schley's part in the affair. Knott listened 



BENCH AND BAR. 277 

until his companion had finished, and then, with that 
characteristic twinkle in his eye, said : 

"My dear sir, it is exceedingly gratifying to me to 
hear you take the position you have in this matter. It is 
like a balm to my conscience and settles a point that has 
worried me many a day. 

" I was walking through the woods with a boy friend 
of mine, when we saw a rabbit run into a sink-hole. We 
stood around the hole a while, when I told the boy to keep 
watch while I went to get some fire to smoke the rabbit 
out. When I returned the boy had the rabbit. I promptly 
took it away from him, claiming it belonged to me be- 
cause I told him to catch him if he came out. 

" That was over fifty years ago, and you are the first 
man who has ever agreed with me that the rabbit was 
mine. I feel now that 1 was right in taking it, and my 
conscience is at rest." 

The gentleman looked solemn for a few moments, then 
smiled a feeble smile and changed the subject. 

Law. — George Stevenson died in 1784. His definition 
of law, with its wealth of bright illustration, is a classic : 

" Law is law — law is law ; and as in such, and so forth, 
and hereby, and aforesaid, provided always, nevertheless, 
and notwithstanding. Law is like a country dance: peo- 
ple are led up and down in it till they are tired. Law is 
like a book of surgery : there are a great many desperate 
cases in it. It is also like physic : they that take least of 
it are best off. Law is like a homely gentlewoman : very 
well to follow. Law is also like a scolding wife: very 
bad when it follows us. Law is like a new fashion: peo- 
ple are bewitched to get into it ; it is also like bad weather: 
most people are glad when they get out of it. 

" We shall now mention a cause, called ' Bullum versus 



278 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Boatum : ' it was a cause that came before me. The cause 
was as follows: 

" There were two farmers : Farmer A. and Farmer B. 
Farmer A. was seized or possessed of a bull; Farmer B. 
was seized or possessed of a ferry-boat. Now, the owner 
of the ferry-boat, having made Irs boat fast to a post on 
shore, with a piece of hay, twisted rope-fashion, or, as 
we say, vulgo vocaio, a hay-band, after he had made his 
boat fast to a post on shore, as it was very natural for a 
hungry man to do, he went up town to dinner. Farmer 
A.'s bull, as it was very natural for a hungry bull to do, 
came down town to look for a dinner; and, observing, 
discovering, seeing, and spying out some turnips in the 
bottom of the ferry-boat, the bull scrambled into the 
ferry-boat; he ate up the turnips, and, to make an end 
of his meal, fell to work upon the hay-band. The boat, 
being eaten from its moorings, floated down the river, 
with the bull in it; it struck against a rock, beat a hole 
in the bottom of the boat, and tossed the bull overboard ; 
whereupon the owner of the bull brought his action 
against the boat for running away with the bull; the 
owner of the boat brought his action against the bull for 
running away with the boat ; and thus notice of trial was 
given, Bullum versus Boatum, Boatum versus Bullum. 

"Now, the counsel for the bull began with saying: 
' My lord, and you gentlemen of the jury, we are counsel 
in this cause for the bull. We are indicted for running 
away with the boat. Now, my lord, we have heard of 
running horses, but never of running bulls before. Now, 
my lord, the bull could no more run away with the boat 
than a man in a coach may be said to run away with the 
horses; therefore, my lord, how can we punish what is 
not punishable ? How can we eat what is not eatable ? 
or how can we drink what is not drinkable ? Or, as the 



BENCH AND BAR. 279 

iaw says, how can we think on what is not thinkable ? 
Therefore, my lord, as we are counsel in this cause for 
the bull, if the jury should bring the bull in guilty, the 
jury would be guilty of a bull.' 

" The counsel for the boat observed that the bull should 
be nonsuited ; because, in his declaration, he had not speci- 
fied what color he was of; for thus wisely, and thus learn- 
edly, spoke the counsel: 'My lord, if the bull was of no 
color, he must be of some color; and, if he was not of any 
color, what color could the bull be of ? ' I overruled this 
motion myself by observing the bull was a white bull, 
and that white is no color; besides, as I told my brethren, 
they should not trouble their heads to talk of color in the 
law, for the law can color anything. This cause being 
afterwards left to a reference, upon the award, both bull 
and boat were acquitted ; it being proved that the tide of 
the river having carried both bull and boat away, both 
bull and boat had a good action against the water-bailiff. 

" My opinion being taken, an action was issued, and, 
upon the traverse, this point of law arose : How, wherefore, 
and whether, why, when, and what, whatsoever, whereas, 
and whereby, as the boat was not a compos mentis evidence, 
how could an oath be administered? That point was 
soon settled by Boatum's attorney declaring that for his 
client he would swear anything. 

" The water-bailiif 's charter was then read, taken out 
of the original record, in true law Latin: which set forth, in 
their declaration, that they were carried away either by 
the tide of flood, or the tide of ebb. The charter of the 
water-bailiff was as follows: 'Aquae bailiffi est magis- 
trate in choisi super omnibus fishibus qui habuerunt 
finnos et scalos, claws, shells, et talos qui swimmare in 
freshibus vel saltibus riveris, lakis, pondis, canalibus, et 
well-boatis; sive 0} 7 steri, prawni, whitimi, shrimpi, tur- 



280 WIT AND HUMOR. 

butus solus;' that is, not turbots alone, but turbots and 
soles both together. But now comes the nicety of the 
law; the law is as nice as a new-laid egg, and not to be 
understood by addle-headed people. Bullura and Boatura 
mentioned both ebb and flood, to avoid quibbling; but it 
being proved that they were carried away neither by the 
tide of flood, nor by the tide of ebb, but exactly upon the 
top of high water, they were nonsuited ; but such was 
the lenity of the court, upon their paying all costs, they 
were allowed to begin again de novo" 

But in these nice sharp quillets of the law, 
Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw. 

— Shakespeare, 

Once (says an author, where, I need not say) 
Two travelers found an oyster in their way; 
Both fierce, both hungry, the dispute grew strong, 
While, scale in hand, Dame Justice passed along. 
Before her each with clamor pleads the laws, 
Explains the matter, and would win the cause. 
Dame Justice, weighing long the doubtful right, 
Takes, opens, swallows it before their sight. 
The cause of strife removed so rarely well, 
"There, take," says Justice, " take ye each a shell; 

We thrive at Westminster on fools like you. 

T was a fat oyster! Live in peace, — adieu." Pave 

Laws are generally found to be nets of such texture as 
the little creep through, the great break through, and the 
middle sized are alone entangled in. — Shenstone. 

We must not make a scarecrow of the law. 

— Shakespeare. 

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns. 

— Louis XIV. 

Self-defense is the clearest of all laws; and for this 

reason — the lawyers didn't make it. 

— Douglas Jerrold. 



BENCH AND BAR. 281 

Henry Fox, in a scathing arraignment of Lord Chan- 
cellor Hardwicke, who was charged with having no desire 
to reform the many abuses of his official office, exclaimed : 

" Touch but a cobweb in Westminster Hall, and the old 
spider of the law is out upon you with all his vermin at 
his heels." 

The Wilkes case, in 1770, brought out this famous ob- 
servation by Chatham : " Unlimited power corrupts the 
possessor; and this I know, that where law ends, there 
tyranny begins." 

John W. Smith, editor of Leading Cases, describes in 
a bright, crisp way the English criminal procedure under 
the old common law : 

" The speedy arm of Justice was never known to fail ; 
The gaol supplied the gallows, the gallows thinned the gaol, 
And sundry wise precautions the sages of the law 
Discreetly framed whereby they aimed to keep the rogues in awe. 
For lest some sturdy criminal false witnesses should brinj, 
His witnesses were not allowed to swear to anything. 
And lest his wily advocate the court should overreach, 
His advocate was not allowed the privilege of speech. 
Yet such was the humanity and wisdom of the law, 
That if in his indictment there appeared to be a flaw, 
The court assigned him counsellors to argue on the doubt. 
Provided he himself had first contrived to point it out. 
Yet lest their mildness should, perchance, be craftily abused, 
To show him the indictment they most sturdily refused. 
But still, that he might understand the nature of the charge, 
The same was in the Latin tongue read out to him at large. 
'Twas thus the law kept rogues at awe, gave honest men protection, 
And justly famed, by all was named, of wisdom the perfection." 

The judge lays down the law. The lawyer takes it up 
and uses it. 

Hints to the young lawyer: 

Success at the bar goes up in an elevator. Failure slips 
•a cog and drops in the well. 



282 WIT AND HUMOR. 

The young lawyer who says "he is going to get there- 
and don't you forget it " makes more noise about it than 
the lawyer who is actually there. 

Never exhibit a sordid activity of gain by putting too 
high a value upon your services. Three-fourths to seven- 
eighths of the amount in litigation is enough. 

Be deferential to the court. Admit that it knows some 
law. Remember that it has spent years trying to know 
as much as you. Do not make it feel that you are trying 
to lift it to your level. 

Be manly, open, fair in your methods. Trickery may 
win, occasionally, but truth will throw it three times out 
of four. Trickery lives in a bad conscience; truth, in the 
sunshine of an open heart. 

The following tribute to the common law, drawn 
from the opinion of Judge Eoss in Snowden v. Warder,. 
3 Rawle, 103, possesses that finest quality of wit — wis- 
dom: 

The common law is truly entitled to our highest vener- 
ation ; and although it has been said by some to have been 
instituted by Brutus, the grandson of JEneas, and the first, 
king of England, who died when Samuel was judge of 
Israel, and who wrote a book in the Greek tongue, which 
he called The Zeros of the Britons, and which he had col- 
lected from the laws of the Trojans, it is nevertheless not 
entitled to our veneration on account of its antiquity; for 
nearly all that is valuable in it is comparatively of modern 
date. Neither is it entitled to our respect on account of 
the ancient, absurd, and superstitious modes of trial, none 
of which have the slightest resemblance to our present 
trial by jury. Still less does it deserve our admiration 
on account of the feudal system, which imposed a re- 
straint upon every effort to improve the jurisprudence of 
the country, and which prevented the adoption of those- 



BENCH AND BAR. 283"- 

maxims of justice and equity which now render it the 
admiration of the enlightened jurist, and the favorite of 
the people. It is, however, entitled to our veneration, 
because it has, within the last two centuries, been molded 
by the wisdom of the ablest statesmen, and a succession 
of learned and- liberal-minded judges, into a flexible sys- 
tem, expanding and contracting its provisions, so as to 
correspond to the changes that are continually taking 
place in society by the progress of luxury and refinement. 
As the youthful skin of a vigorous child expands with its 
growth, and accommodates itself to every development 
which the body, in its progress to maturity, makes of its- 
powers, capacities and energies, so does the common law, 
in order to suit the exigencies of society, possess the power 
of altering, amending and regenerating itself. It has been 
truly and eloquently said that " it is the law of a free peo- 
ple, and has freedom for its end ; and under it we live 
both free and happy. When we go forth, it walks silently 
and unobtrusively by our side, covering us with its invisi- 
ble shield from violence and wrong. Beneath our own 
roof, or by our own fireside, it makes our home our castle. 
All ages, sexes, and conditions share in its protecting in- 
fluence. It shadows with its wings the infant's cradle r 
and with its arm upholds the tottering steps of age." It 
is the duty of the judiciary not only to guard it with vigi- 
lance against incongruous innovations, but also to extend 
the operation of its principles so as to embrace all the 
new and various interests which arise among an active 
and enterprising people. Thus much for the common law. 

Lawrence, William. — The story of the law citation 
made by Judge Lawrence, of Ohio, in the United States 
Supreme Court, is a good one. During the Garfield ad- 
ministration the eminent judge was Solicitor for the 



284 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Treasury Department, and his chief function was the de- 
cision of mooted points arising under the customs laws. 
The judge's rulings as to whether violins are household 
furniture and such tariff disputes were quite elaborate, 
and bristled with quotations from the entire realm of 
knowledge. 

Naturally inclined to rely upon the conclusive wisdom 
of his own legal opinions, he had them collated and bound 
in five volumes of law sheep covers and labeled like the 
familiar reports of a high court. He did not* even neglect 
having the word "Lawrence" emblazoned where usually 
the court reporter's name designates the series. Thus 
panoplied with legal lore, the judge one day confronted 
Ohief Justice Waite and his bench of associates to argue 
a case on appeal. In the course of his remarks he laid 
down a principle as law which caused the Chief Justice 
to lean forward curiously. 

"Wiry, Judge," said the great jurist, "where is your 
authority for that doctrine ? " 

" May it please the court, you will find that fully ex- 
pounded in Lawrence I, 321-323," was the response. 

"First Lawrence — Lawrence — why, Judge, I never 
heard of any such set of reports." 

" Why, I beg pardon, but it is one of my own," stam- 
mered Ohio's great defender of the sheep, and the court 
was convulsed with merriment to the permissible limit. 

This story recalls the one about Senator Stewart's quo- 
tations from " eminent authorities " during a discussion 
on the subject of finance. At the close of a lengthy ex- 
tract, Senator Hoar inquired from what book the Senator 
from Nevada had been reading. " It is an analysis of the 
functions of money, by William M. Stewart, United States 
Senator," was the reply. 



BENCH AND BAR 2bi> 

Lawyers.— The late John E. Kennedy, of the Balti- 
more bar, was a graceful, natural writer. His character 
sketch "Old Lawyers" is finely drawn: 

I have a great reverence for the profession of the law 
and its votaries; but especially for that part of the tribe 
which comprehends the old and thorough-paced stagers 
of the bar. The feelings, habits, and associations of the 
bar in general have a very happy influence upon the 
character. It abounds with good fellows. And, take it 
altogether, there may be collected from it a greater mass 
of shrewd, observant, droll, playful and generous spirits 
than from any other equal members of society. They 
live in each other's presence like a set of players; con- 
gregate in courts like the former in the green room ; and 
break their unpremeditated jests, in the interval of busi- 
ness, with that sort of undress freedom that contrasts 
amusingly with the solemn and even tragic seriousness 
with which they appear, in turn, upon the boards. They 
have one face for the public, rife with the saws and 
learned gravity of the profession, and another for them- 
selves, replete with broad mirth, sprightly wit, and gay 
thoughtlessness. The intense mental toil and fatigue of 
business give them a peculiar relish for the enjoyment of 
their hours of relaxation, and, in the same degree, inca- 
pacitate them for that frugal attention to their private 
concerns which their limited means usually require. They 
have, in consequence, a prevailing air of unthriftiness in 
personal matters, which, however it may operate to the 
prejudice of the pocket of the individual, has a mellow 
and kindly effect upon his disposition. 

In an old member of the prof ession — one who has 
grown grey in the service — there is a rich unction of orig- 
inality that brings him out from the ranks of his fellow- 
men in strong relief. His habitual conversancy w T ith the 



286 WIT AND HUMOR. 

world in its strangest varieties, and with the secret his- 
tory of character, gives him a shrewd estimate of the 
human heart. He is quiet and unapt to be struck with 
wonder at any of the actions of men. There is a deep cur- 
rent of observation running calmly through his thoughts, 
and seldom gushing out in words; the confidence which 
has been placed in him, in the thousand relations of his 
profession, renders him constitutionally cautious. His ac- 
quaintance with the vicissitudes of fortune, as they have 
been exemplified in the lives of individuals* and with the 
-severe afflictions that have " tried the reins " of many, 
known only to himself, makes him an indulgent and char- 
itable apologist of the aberrations of others. He has an 
impregnable good humor, that never falls below the level 
of thoughtfulness into melancholy. He is a creature of 
habits ; rising early for exercise ; temperate from neces- 
sity, and studious against his will. His face is accustomed 
to take the ply of his pursuits with great facility, grave 
and even severe in business, and steadily rising into smiles 
at a pleasant conceit. He works hard when at his task; 
and goes at it with the reluctance of an old horse in a 
bark-mill. His common-places are quaint and profes- 
sional: they are made up of law maxims, and first occur 
to him in Latin. He measures all the sciences out of his 
proper line of study (and with these he is but scantily ac- 
quainted) by the rules of law. He thinks a steam-engine 
should be worked with due diligence, and without laches; 
a thing little likely to happen he considers as potentia 
remotissima; and what is not yet in existence, or in esse, 
as he would say, is in nubibus. He apprehends that wit 
best that is connected with the affairs of the term ; is par- 
ticularly curious in his anecdotes of old lawyers, and in- 
clined to be talkative concerning the amusing passages 
•of his own professional life. He is, sometimes, not alto- 



BENCH AND BAR. 287 

gether free of outward foppery; is apt to be an especially 
good liver, and he keeps the best company. His literature 
is not much diversified; and he prefers books that are 
bound in plain calf to those that are much gilded and 
lettered. He garners up his papers with a wonderful ap- 
pearance of care; ties them in bundles with red tape; and 
usually has great difficulty to find them when he wants 
them. Too much particularity has perplexed him; and 
just so it is with his cases; they are well assorted, packed 
and hid away in his mind, but are not easily to be brought 
forth again without labor. This makes him something 
of a procrastinator, and rather to delight in new business 
than finish his old. He is, however, much beloved, and 
affectionately considered by the people. 

Peter the Great, being at "Westminster Hall in term 
time, and seeing multitudes of people swarming about 
the courts of law, inquired : 

" Who are all those busy people ? " 

" Lawyers," was the reply. 

" Lawyers ! why, I have but four in my whole kingdom, 
and I design to hang two of them as soon as I get home." 

The only case in which the attorneys had his Satanic 
majesty on the run is reported in the following verses: 

The devil came up to the earth one day, 
And into the court he wended his way, 
Just as the attorney, with very grave face, 
Was proceeding to argue the point in a case. 

Now, a lawyer his majesty never had seen, 
For to his dominions none ever had been, 
And he felt very anxious the reason to know 
Why none had been sent to the regions below. 

'Twas the fault of his agents, his majesty thought, 
That none of these lawyers had ever been caught, 
And for his own pleasure he felt a desire, 
To come to the earth and the reason inquire. 



288 WIT AND HUMOR 

Well, the lawyer who rose, with a visage so grave^ 
Made out his opponent a consummate knave; 
And Satan felt considerably amused 
To hear the attorney so badly abused. 

But soon as the speaker had come to a close, 
The counsel opposing him fiercely arose, 
And heaped such abuse on the head of the first, 
That made him a villain of all men the worst. 

Thus they quarreled, contended, and argued, so long, 
'Twas hard to determine which of them was wrong, 
And concluding he'd heard enough of the fuss, 
Old Nick turned away, and soliloquized thus: 

" They've puzzled the court with their villainous cavil, 
And, I'm free to confess it, they've puzzled the Devil; 
My agents were right to let lawyers alone, 
If I had them they'd swindle me out of my throne." 

In Grant's English Bench and Bar is the following bit 
of pleasantry descriptive of practitioners in the Law 
Courts half a century ago : 

The Courts of Law, like the Houses of Parliament, are 
at Westminster. The only entrance is now at the east 
end of Westminster Hall, a place which, since its recent 
fitting up with so much taste, has become a favorite place 
of promenade for the gentlemen of the long robe. When 
I say " gentlemen of the long robe," I must restrict, in this 
instance, the application of the term to those who are 
well employed. They are glad to get out of court for a 
few moments, in order that they may enjoy a little exer- 
cise and breathe withal the fresh air, after some great 
forensic effort — great in regard to the time they have 
been on their legs, if not always in point of brilliancy of 
eloquence. You never see a briefless barrister walking 
for five minutes at a time in Westminster Hall; nor, I 
will answer for it, anywhere else when attired in his long 
robe. Though literally doing nothing, he wishes it to be 



BENCH AND BAR. 289 

understood that he is so completely over head and ears 
in briefs and business that he has not a moment to spare 
in exercising his locomotive powers. The unpracticing 
practitioners in the courts are so busy in helping one an- 
other to do nothing that they will not venture out on any 
account to have a few moments' walk in Westminster 
Hall. 

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish be- 
tween two cats. — B. Franklin. 

Who Matches a Lawyer is an old English ballad : 

" A lawyer, quite famous for making a bill, 

And who in good living delighted, 
To dinner one day with hearty good-will 

Was by a rich merchant invited. 
But he charged six and eight pence for going to dine, 

Which the client he paid, though no ninny, 
And in turn charged the lawyer the dinner and wine, 

One a crown and the other a guinea. 
But gossips, you know, have a saying in store, 
He who matches a lawyer has only one more. 

" The lawyer he paid it and took a receipt, 

While the client stared at him with wonder. 
With the produce he gave a magnificent treat, 

But the lawyer soon made him knock under. 
That his client sold wine, information he laid, 

Without license, and spite of his storming, 
The client a good thumping penalty paid, 

And the lawyer got half for informing. 
But gossips, you know, have a saying in store, 
He who matches a lawyer has only one more." 

Vagellius was a Roman lawyer, for revenue only. His 
character is finely versified in Garth's Dispensary: 

" Since of each enterprise th' event's unknown, 
We'll quit the sword, and hearken to the gown; 
Nigh lives Vagellius, one reputed long, 
For strength of lungs, and pliancy of tongue; 
19 



290 wit and humor 

For fees to any form he moulds a case, 
The worst has merits, and the best has flaw. 
Five guineas make a criminal to-day, 
And ten to-morrow wipe the stain away; 
To law, then, friends, for 'tis by fate decreed, 
Vagellius and our money shall succeed." 

Lawyers, of whose art the basis 
Is raising feuds and splitting cases. 

— Butler. 

Lawyers' robes are lined with the obstinacy of litigants. 

— Italian Proverb. 

The lawyer is a gentleman who rescues your estate 
from your enemies, and keeps it to himself. 

— Brougham. 

Every man should know something of law. If he 
knows enough to keep out of it, he is a pretty good law- 
yer. — Josh Billings. 

Two lawyers, when a knotty case was o'er, 
Shook hands, and were as friendly as before; 
"Zounds ! " said the client. " I would fain know how 
You can be friends, who were such foes just now ? " 
"Thou fool ! " said one, " We lawyers, though so keen, 
Like shears, ne'er cut ourselves, but what's between." 

An idle attorney besought a brother 

For "something to read, — some novel or other, 

That was really fresh and new." 
"Take Chitty ! " replies his legal friend; 
"There isn't a book that I could lend, 

That would prove more ' novel ' to you ! " 

— Saxe. 

Lee, George H. — A stone mason employed ex-Judge 
Lee, of the Virginia Supreme Bench of Appeals, to write 
a deed, and was greatly surprised that the price was five 
dollars. " What, Judge ! " he exclaimed, " you surely don't 
mean to charge me five dollars for that little bit of scrib- 
bling, do you ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 291 

"But, Jim," replied the judge, "you don't appear to 
understand. Remember I am not charging you for the 
writing merely — not for the mechanical execution, — but 
for the art of knowing how to do it, you see ? " 

This explanation was satisfactory to Jim, and the price 
was no longer disputed. 

Sometime after this, the judge had occasion to have a 
couple of grates set in his residence, and Jim was selected 
to do the work. When it was finished, the judge inquired 
the price, and was promptly informed that it was five 
dollars. 

" Five dollars ? My goodness ! Why, Jim, certainly not 
five dollars for only a few hours' work? Why, that's 
enough to — " 

" But look here, Judge," interrupted Jim. " Remem- 
ber, I am not charging you for the work merely — not 
for the mechanical execution, — but for the art of know- 
ing how to do it, you see." 

The joke was too highly appreciated by the judge to 
further dispute the bill, and he cheerfully paid it. 

Legislation. — Lord Hermand, a Scotch judge, was 
very apt to say: "My laards, I feel my law here, my 
laards," striking his heart. Hence he made little cere- 
mony in disdaining the authority of an act of parliament 
when he and it happened to differ. He once got rid of 
. one by saying, in a contemptuous way, with an emphasis 
on every syllable : 

" But then we're told that there's a statut' against all 
this. A statut' ! What's a statut' ? Words! mere words! 
And am I to be tied down by words? JSTo, my laards; I 
go by the law of right reason." 

An ordinance of the Council of Falaise provided that 
" No citizen shall go out at night without a lantern." A 



292 WIT AND HUMOR 

supplement read, " No citizen shall go out at night with- 
out a candle in his lantern." The ordinance and supple- 
ment required a lantern with a candle in it, but made no 
provision for light. Hence it became necessary to pass 
another supplement, " No citizen shall go out at night 
without a lighted candle in his lantern." 

A Virginia lawyer, objecting to an expression in a 
Pennsylvania statute "that the State House be sur- 
rounded by a brick wall and remain an open enclosure 
forever," Judge Brackenridge referred him to an act of 
Virginia entitled " A supplement to an act to amend an 
act making it penal to alter the mark of an unmarked 
hog." 

An ingenious attorney drafted a bill introduced into 
the Nebraska legislature forbidding: 

" The firing of any pistol, revolver, shot-gun, rifle, or 
any firearms whatsoever on any public road or highway, 
or within sixty yards of such public road or highway, ex- 
cept to destroy some wild, ferocious, or dangerous beast, 
or an officer in the discharge of his duty." 

An early statute of the same state reads : 
" For the violation of the third section of an act to 
license and regulate the sale of malt, spirituous and vinous 
liquors, $25 ; and on proof of the violation thereof, the 
justice shall render judgment for the whole amount of 
fine and costs, and be committed to the common jail until 
the same is paid." 

Levy, Sampson. — Levy was a prominent figure at 
the Philadelphia bar. The Forum says of him that his off- 
hand speeches were perfect gems; they flashed, sparkled 
and coruscated in every direction. This led Judge Wash- 
ington once to remark that Levy was the most trouble- 



BENCH AND BAR, 293 

some speaker at the bar, as in beating every bush, in 
sporting phrase, he sometimes started game which he al- 
most immediately left for the judge to hunt down. He 
seemed to be unconscious of his wit until he observed its 
sudden, explosive effect upon others. 

After an able argument by Mr. Dallas, in a marine 
case, the judge inquired of Levy what answer he could 
give to it; to which he replied: 

u Mr. Dallas is not familiar with maritime law, your 
honor, and he has made some egregious mistakes in his 
views of the case, which I should not like publicly to ex- 
pose in a crowded court-house ; but if my learned friend 
will allow me a moment's private interview, I will con- 
vince him of his error." 

" You need not read the book you have cited," said 
Judge Barnes to Levy, " I know all about it." 

" If," said Levy, closing the book, " you know all about 
it, now tell me, if you please, what it is, and what use I 
am about to make of it." 

Upon an argument before the Supreme Court, Levy was 
citing a case from the Reports. Chief Justice Tilghman 
turned to him, in his usual mild way, and said: 

"Mr. Levy, you are not reading the opinion of the 
court, but the argument of counsel." 

"I know that," said Levy. "I read the argument of 
counsel because it is generally the best part of a case." 

Liens. — The Court of Session was deliberating on a 
bill of suspension and interdict, relative to certain cara- 
vans with wild beasts on the old earthen mound of Edin- 
burgh ; and in the course of the proceedings Lord Banna- 
tyne fell asleep. The case was disposed of and the next 
one called, which related to a right of lien over certain 



294 WIT AND HUMOR. 

goods. The learned lord, who continued dozing, having 
heard the word lien pronounced with a most emphatic 
Scotch accent by Lord Meadowbank, caused the follow- 
ing learned discussion: 

Meadowbank (loq.): " I am very clear that there was a 
lien upon this property." 

Bannatyne (dozing): "Certainly; but it ought to be 
chained, because — " 

Balmuto: " My lord, it's no a livin' lion — it's the Latin 
word lien." 

Hermand: "No, sir; the word is French." 

Balmuto: "I thought it was Latin, for it's in italics." 

Lincoln, Abraham. — Lincoln's name is a synonym 
of freedom wherever the flag floats and civilization runs. 

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every 
battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and 
hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the 
chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they 
will be, bv the better angels of our nature. 

— First Inaugural Address. 

With malice towards none, with charity for all, with 
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. 

— Second Inaugural Address. 

That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of 
freedom, and that government of the people, by the peo- 
ple, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 

— Address at Gettysburg. 

Stephen A. Douglas said in 1858, when he heard that 
Lincoln was to be his opponent for United States Sen- 
ator in Illinois: "I shall have my hands full. He is the 
strong man of his party — full of wit, facts, dates, and 



BENCH AND BAR. 295 

the best stump-speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, 
;n the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I 
beat him my victory will be hardly won." 

You can fool all the people some of the time ; some of 
the people all the time ; but you canH fool all the people 
all the time. 

Hon. Eichard W. Thompson, of Indiana, referring to 
Lincoln's keen love of the humorous, says: 

" President Lincoln did not originate the best of his 
stories. He had a very receptive memory and stored 
away every anecdote he heard. His mind was such that 
he was able to use such things in the way of illustration. 
His favorite way of conveying an idea was by a story. 
For instance, take an incident which occurred one night 
when I was at the White House. I had been spending 
the evening there with Lincoln. We had chatted for an 
hour or so, when the clock struck half past ten. I then 
got up and said that I must go home. I told the Presi- 
dent that he must be tired and that he ought to go to bed 
and get the rest which he needed to fortify him for the 
worries and troubles of the morrow. 

" ' Eo,' replied Lincoln, ' don't go yet. Stay a half hour 
longer. I have an appointment at eleven o'clock with a 
man from Boston who has a claim of something like 
$200,000 against the government. I have told him he 
could bring his papers here at eleven, and he will surely 
call on the minute.' 

" l All right,' said I. ' I will stay.' 

"Well, the man was announced as the clock struck 
eleven. As he came in, Lincoln took his papers and said: 
6 1 can't look over this matter now, but if you will leave 
the papers I will attend to it as soon as I can find time.' 

" There were a number of parties opposing the claim, 
and I could see that the man wanted to get some idea as 



296 WIT AND HUMOR 

to what his chances were before he left. He volunteered 
a question, hoping to draw the President out. Lincoln 
appreciated his feeling and told the following: 

" You make me think of a lawyer out in Illinois who 
wanted to turn merchant. He had not succeeded at the 
law, and he decided to close his office and open a store. 
He wrote to New York for a stock of goods and offered 
his fellow-attorneys as references. The wholesale house 
wrote to one of these as to the responsibility of the 
would-be storekeeper, whom we will call Tom Jones. 
The reply which was received was about as follows: 

"' I think Tom Jones is good. I know he is rich. His 
assets, I should say, amount to at least $200,000. He 
has, in the first place, a wife, a beautiful, dark-haired 
brunette, who is worth to him or to any man $100,000. 
I am sure he would not sell her for that. I know I should 
not if she belonged to me. He has also two children, a 
boy and a girl. The boy is perfectly sound. He is eleven 
years old, and is brisk, energetic and smart. I don't 
think he could be bought at any price. I know Jones 
would not sell him for $50,000. I think that $49,950 
would be a low estimate for the girl, as she has the mak- 
ing of a good woman in her. In addition to these items, 
Jones has a table in his office worth $2, two chairs worth 
fifty cents each, an inkstand worth fifteen cents, and a 
double-bladed Barlow knife, which I put at a dime, and 
besides, there is in his office a great big rat-hole, which is 
worth looking into." 'And so, ' concluded the President, 
4 although I don't know much about your claim, I think 
there may be a great big rat-hole there which may be 
worth looking into, and I will look into it.' The man 
laughed and went away well pleased." 

"When Lincoln was practicing law in Illinois, he and 
the county judge, bantering each other about trading 



BENCH AND BAR. 297 

horses, agreed to trade at nine o'clock the next morn- 
ing — the horses to remain unseen to that hour. At the 
time appointed the judge appeared with the sorriest speci- 
men of a horse ever seen in that region, and a little later, 
Lincoln, with a wooden saw-horse on his shoulder. Great 
was the laughter of the crowd, and still greater when 
Lincoln, surveying the judge's animal, exclaimed: 

"Well, judge, this is the first time I ever got the worst 
of it in a horse trade." 

" In the winter of 1859-60," says Judge Foster, " Lin- 
coln visited Kansas, making speeches at Troy and Atchi- 
son. At Atchison he put up at the old Massasoit House, 
which every old-time politician will remember. General 
Stringfellow, John A. Martin, Tom Murphy and I called 
upon Lincoln at the hotel. In the course of the conver- 
sation Lincoln turned to Stringfellow, who was a pro- 
slavery advocate, and said : 

" General Stringfellow, you pro-slavery fellows gave 
as one reason why slavery should be permitted in Kansas 
that only the negro could break up the tough prairie sod. 
Now I've broken hundreds of acres of prairie sod in my 
time, and the only question which remains to be decided 
is whether I am a white man or a negro." 

General Stringfellow admitted the force of the argu- 
ment, and congratulated Lincoln upon his pointed, log- 
ical way of putting things. 

Speaking of Lincoln's numberless stories, the late Sen- 
ator Voorhees, of Indiana, said : 

" I recall one he told in the argument of a case. His 
legal opponent was a glib talker, but not deeply profound. 
Reckless and irresponsible in his addresses, he would say 
to a jury anything which happened to enter his head. 
Lincoln, in his address to the jury, referring to this, said : 

" ' My friend on the other side is all right, or would be 



298 WIT AND HUMOR. 

all right were it not for the peculiarity I am about to 
chronicle. His habit — of which you have witnessed a 
very painful specimen in his argument to you in this case — 
of reckless assertion and statements without grounds, need 
not be imputed to him as a moral fault or as telling of a 
moral blemish. He can't help it. For reasons which, 
gentlemen of the jury, you and I have not time to study 
here, as deplorable as they are surprising, the oratory of 
the gentleman completely suspends all action of his mind. 
The moment he begins to talk his mental operations cease. 
I never knew of but one thing which compared with my 
friend in this particular. That was a small steamboat. 
Back in the days when I performed my part as a keel 
boatman, I made the acquaintance of a trifling little steam- 
boat, which used to bustle and puff and wheeze about in 
the Sangamon river. It had a five-foot boiler and a seven- 
foot whistle, and every time the whistle blew, the boat 
stopped.' " 

There lived in Springfield in 1S60 an Irish day-laborer, 
John McCarty, an intense Democrat. Shortly after the 
Presidential election, Lincoln was walking along the pub- 
lic square, and John was shoveling out the gutter. As 
the President-elect approached, McCarty rested on his 
shovel, and holding out his hand, said bluntly: 

"An so yer elected Presiclint, are ye ? Faith an it wasn't 
by my vote, at all, at all ! " 

" Well, yes, John," replied Lincoln, shaking hands with 
John very cordially; "the papers say I'm elected; but it 
seems odd I should be when you opposed me." 

" Well, Misther Lincoln," said John, dropping his voice 
lest some brother-Democrat should hear the confession, 
"I'm glad ye got it, after all. It's moighty little pace 
I've had wid Biddy for votin' forninst ye; an' if ye'd bin 
bate, she'd ha' driv me from the shanty, as shure's the- 
worrold." 



BENCH AND BAR 299 

* Give my compliments to Biddy, John, and tell her I'll 
think seriously of women-suffrage," said Lincoln with a 
smile, as he passed on to his office. 

When Lincoln used to be drifting around the country, 
practicing law in Fulton and Menard counties, Illinois, 
an old fellow met him going to Lewistown, riding a horse 
which, while it was a serviceable enough animal, was not 
of the kind to be truthfully called a fine saddler. It was 
a weather-beaten nag, patient and plodding, and it toiled 
along with Lincoln; and his books, tucked away in sad- 
dle-bags, lay heavy on the horse's flanks. 

" Hello, Uncle Tommy," said Lincoln. 

" Hello, Abe," responded Uncle Tommy, " I'm power- 
ful glad to see ye, Abe, fer I'm gwyne to have sumthin' 
fer ye at Lewiston cote, I reckon." 

"How's that, Uncle Tommy?" 

" Well, Jim Adams, his land runs along o' mine, he's 
pesterin' me a heap, an' I got to git the law on Jim, I 
reckon." 

" Uncle Tommy, you haven't had any fight with Jim, 
have you ? " 

"No." 

" He's a fair to middling neighbor, isn't he ? " 

"Only tollable, Abe." 

" He's been a neighbor of yours for a long time, hasn't 
he?" 

" Nigh onto fifteen year." 

" Part of the time you get along all right, don't you ? " 

" I reckon we do, Abe." 

" Well, now, Uncle Tommy, you see this horse of mine ? 
He isn't as good a horse as I could straddle, and I some- 
times get out of patience with him, but I know his faults. 
He does fairly well as horses go, and it might take me a 
long time to get used to some other horse's faults. For 



300 WIT AND HUMOR. 

all horses have faults. You and Uncle Jimmy must put 
up with each other, as I and my horse do with one an- 
other." 

"I reckon, Abe," said Uncle Tommy, as he bit off about 
four ounces of Missouri plug, " I reckon j r ou're about right." 

And Lincoln, with a smile on his gaunt face, rode on 
toward Lewiston. 

When Lincoln first visited Gen. Grant's headquarters 
the driver of the mules was arguing with his team in that 
picturesque fashion which the army teamster thinks can 
best be understood by the mule. Lincoln's rebuke of the 
blasphemy, which he detested, was unique: 

" My friend," said he, " are you an Episcopalian ? " 

"No, Mr. President, I am a Methodist." 

" Oh," said Lincoln, u I thought you were an Episco- 
palian, because my Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, some- 
times talks that way, and he is a warden in the Episco- 
pal church in Auburn." 

A hi^h sense of honor marked Lincoln's career at the 
bar. An incident will illustrate. A stranger called to 
retain his services. " State your case," said Lincoln. The 
man did. Then Lincoln said : 

" I cannot represent you, for you are wrong and the 
other party is right." 

" That is none of your business if I employ you." 
" None of my business ! My business is never to defend 
wrong. I never take a case that is manifestly wrong." 
" Well, but you can make trouble for the other fellow." 
" Yes," said Lincoln, " I can set a whole community at 
loggerheads; I can make trouble for this widow and her 
fatherless children, and thereby get you six hundred dol- 
lars which rightfully belongs as much to the woman as 
it does to you. But I won't do it." 



BENCH AND BAR. 301 

" Not if I pay you well ? " slyly suggested the would-be 
ciient." 

" Not for all the money you are worth." 

Secretary Stanton was once greatly vexed because an 
army officer had refused to understand an order, or, at all 
events, had not obeyed. 

"I believe I'll sit down," said Stanton to Lincoln, " and 
give that fellow a piece of my mind." 

"Do so," said Lincoln; " write it now, while you have 
it in your mind. Make it sharp; cut him all up." 

Stanton did not need a second invitation. It was a bone- 
crusher that he read to the President. 

" That's right," said Lincoln ; " that's a good one." 

" Whom can I get to send it by ? " mused the Secretary. 

" Send it ! " replied Lincoln ; " send it ! Why, don't 
send it at all. Tear it up. You have freed your mind 
on the subject, and that is all that is necessary. Tear it up. 
You never want to send such letters; I never do." 

When congratulated by the National Union League 
upon his renomination to the Presidency, Lincoln replied: 

"I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude 
that I am the best man in this country ; but I am reminded 
in this connection of the story of an old Dutch farmer, 
who remarked to a companion that it was not best to swap 
horses when crossing a stream." 

A gentleman asked him for a pass to Eichmond. "Well," 
said the President, " I would be very happy to oblige, if 
my passes were respected ; but the fact is, I have, within 
the past two years, given passes to two hundred and fifty 
thousand men to go to Eichmond, and not one has got 
there yet." 

In a case involving a bod^y attack, Lincoln defended 
and told the jury that his client was in the fix of a man 



302 WIT AND HUMOR. 

who, in going along the highway with a pitchfork over 
his shoulder, was attacked by a fierce dog that ran at him 
from a farmer's door-yard. In parrying off the brute 
with the fork, its prongs stack into him and killed him. 

"What made you kill my dog? " said the farmer. 

" What made him bite me ? " 

" But why did you not go after him with the other end 
of the pitchfork ? " 

" Why did he not come at me with his other end ? " 
At this Lincoln whirled about in his long arms an imagi- 
nary dog and pushed his tail end towards the jury. This 
was the defensive plea of son assault demesne — loosely, 
that "The other fellow brought on the fight" — quickly 
told and in a way the dullest mind would grasp and retain. 

Just before the fall of Vicksburg, a self-constituted 
committee urged Lincoln to remove General Grant from 
command, on the ground of alleged intemperate habits. 
After listening to them, the President brought the inter- 
view to a sudden close by asking them if they knew where 
the General bought his whiskey ; " because, if I can find 
out, I will send every general in the field a barrel of it." 

When sick with the varioloid, Lincoln told the doctor 
he was "glad that now he had something to give which 
the office-seekers did not want." 

After the publication of Secretary Chase's able treas- 
ury report in 1863, a friend of the President went to him 
(Lincoln) with a suggestion that Mr. Chase should be 
looked after ; he was using his power as Secretary of the 
Treasury to further his schemes for the Presidency. Lin- 
coln laughed and brought out the inevitable story. An 
Illinois farmer, employing only one poor old horse, was 
plowing one day, while his son sat on the nearest fence. 
Suddenly the old horse pricked up his ears and started 



BENCH AND BAR. 303 

'briskly onward in the furrow, dragging the old man at the 
plowtail around the land. The lad, surveying the un- 
usual sight, cried out: 

" Say, dad, why don't you brush off that gadfly on old 
Dobbin's back?" 

" I never saw Dobbin doing so well before. Let the 
gadfly be." 

In February, 1865, Lincoln attended the Hampton 
Koads conference. When Mr. Hunter, the Confederate 
Secretary of State, referred to the correspondence be- 
tween Charles I. and Parliament as a precedent for a 
negotiation between a constitutional ruler and rebels, 
Lincoln replied: 

"Upon matters of history, I must refer you to Mr. 
Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don't pro- 
fess to be; but my only distinct recollection of the mat- 
ter is, that Charles lost his head." 

A delegation of preachers from Chicago once waited 
upon him to urge the issuance of the emancipation proc- 
lamation. The spokesman urged the claim with ecclesi- 
astical dignity by saying: 

"The Lord sends this commission to you, President 
Lincoln." 

"Perhaps so; but isn't it strange that he should send 
His message by way of Chicago ? " 

To another delegation urging immediate action, he said : 

" If you call the tail of a sheep a leg, how many legs 
will the sheep have ? " 

" Five," replied the spokesman. 

"No," said the bothered President, "it would only 
have four. Calling the tail a leg wouldn't make it one." 

After he had sent the name of the Eev. Shrigley to 
the Senate for confirmation as hospital chaplain in the 



304 WIT AND HUMOR 

army, a self-constituted committee of the Young Men's 
Christian Association called on him to protest against the 
appointment. After Shrigley's name had been men- 
tioned, the President said : 

" Yes, I have sent it to the Senate. His testimonials 
are highly satisf acton 7 and the appointment will no doubt 
be confirmed at an early day." 

The young men replied : 

" But, sir, we have come not to ask for the appoint- 
ment, but to solicit you to withdraw the nomination, on 
the ground that Mr. Shrigley is not evangelical in his 
sentiments." 

" Ah ! " said the President, " that alters the case. On 
what point of doctrine is the gentleman unsound?" 

" He does not believe in endless punishment," was the 
reply. " Yes," added another of the committee, " he be- 
lieves that even the rebels themselves will finally be saved ; 
and it will never do to have a man with such views hos- 
pital chaplain." 

The President hesitated to reply for a moment, and then 
responded with an emphasis they will long remember: 

" If that be so, gentleman, and there be any way under 
heaven whereby the rebels can be saved, then let the 
man be appointed." 

He was appointed. 

In his " Notes for a Law Lecture," written in 1850, 
Lincoln drops some words of wisdom good for all time: 

" Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to 
compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how 
the nominal winner is often a real loser — in fees, ex- 
penses and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer 
has a superior opportunity of being a good man." 

" Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely 
be found than one who does this. Who can be more 



BENCH AND BAR 305 

nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the 
register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon 
to stir up strife and put money in his pocket? A moral 
tone ought to be infused into the profession to drive such 
men out of it." 

Lockwood, Prank.— The late Sir Frank Lockwood, 
one of the most brilliant advocates of the English bar, 
was famed alike for his witticisms and his professional 
acuteness. An instance of his ready wit came to hand 
during one of his autumnal visits to Scotland. It is a 
custom with Scottish territorial magnates to be known 
by the names of their estates. Thus Mr. and Mrs. Cam- 
eron, of Lochiel, the immediate predecessors of Mr. and 
Mrs. Lockwood at a social function, were announced as 
Lochiel and Mrs. Cameron. The wily Yorkshireman 
promptly gave in his own name and his wife's as 26 Len- 
nox Garden and Mrs. Lockwood. 

Lockwood, while attending a police court, noticed that 
the magistrates were performing their duties in a very 
expeditious manner, and he commented on the fact to a* 
superintendent of police. 

" Yes," answered the superintendent, who was pompous 
and none too well educated, " their worships always dis- 
penses with justice very fast." 

Lockwood was wont to relate with great relish an in- 
cident that happened while he was yet young as a law- 
yer. A barrister was conducting the prosecution of a 
man for stealing a tea-cup, and in the middle of his ad- 
dress to the jury a telegram was placed in his hand. In- 
stantly the impetuous recipient, who had taken a five- 
shilling chance in the Bar "sweep," exclaimed joyously: 

" Galopin's won — and I've won ! " 

20 



306 WIT AND HUMOR 

His lordship, taken aback by this extraordinary pro- 
ceeding, demanded to know the meaning of it. The bar- 
rister apologized for his conduct, and craved forgiveness. 

" It is most improper," said his lordship, " and I trust 
it may never occur again." 

The case was then about to be resumed, when the judge 
dryly intervened with — 

" Oh, by-the-by, Mr. X., did the telegram say what was 
third?" 

Touching a remark as to the extraordinary dullness of 
certain men who have occupied the judicial bench, Lock- 
wood related an instance within his own experience: A 
man had stolen a spade, and was tried before a stupid 
but well-meaning and conscientious magistrate. He care- 
fully looked up "Archbold's Criminal Law," to find a 
precedent on which he could convict and punish the man. 

" I can't find anything under the word i spade,' " said 
he, "although I see that a man was convicted and severely 
punished for stealing a shovel." Then looking at the 
culprit severely over his spectacles, he added, " You have 
had a very narrow escape, but you may go now." 

The story of his first brief is related by Lockwood: 

" It was to appear for a company before Lord Komilly, 
and the brief was marked two guineas and one guinea, 
the one guinea, of course, being for the consultation — 
figures that filled me with inexpressible delight. Well, 
the matter being more or less formal, and counsel on the 
other side having been heard, Lord Eomilly asked me 
what I appeared for. 

" c For the Company, my lord,' I promptly replied. 

"' Yes, but what for?' Lord Romilly rejoined. 

" Not knowing what he meant, and being full of my fee, 
I burst out, ' For two and one, my lord.' " 



BENCH AND BAR. 307 

Logic. — A lawyer, who ought to have known better, 
once determined to indulge in a little litigation on his ow r n 
behalf. He brought an action against another lawyer for 
having, with intent to injure him in his practice, said that 
he, " Peter Palmer, was a paltry lawyer, and had as much 
law as a jackanapes." It was maintained for the other 
side that the words were not slanderous. Had the de- 
fendant said " Mr. Palmer had no more law than a jack- 
anapes," it would certainly have been actionable; but the 
words complained of were, " He had as much law as a 
jackanapes." This, with irresistible logic, was held to be 
no impeachment of the plaintiff's legal knowledge or abil- 
ity ; " for every man that has more than a jackanapes has 
as much." 

London barrister to inhabitant of a small village in 
Scotland: "But surely you must find it very dull here, 
never getting any newspapers. How d'you know what's 
going on in London, for instance ? " 

"Eh, mon, but dinna ye ken that th' folk in London 
are just as ignorant o' what's gaun on wi' us ? " 

Ashley applies to Reed to become a law student in the 
latter's office, offering to pay him three hundred dollars 
when he gains his first law-suit. Reed accepts the offer 
and admits Ashley to the privileges of a student. Before 
the termination of Ashley's pupilage, Reed, tired of wait- 
ing for his money, determines to sue Ashley for the 
amount, reasoning thus : If I gain the case Ashley will 
be compelled to pay me by the decision of the court ; if 
I lose it, he w T ill have to pay me, by the terms of the con- 
tract, having won his first law-suit. But Ashley is not 
alarmed when he learns of Reed's intention to sue; for 
he reasons thus: If the decision of the court is in my 
favor, I shall not have to pay the money; if against me, 



308 WIT AND HUMOR. 

I shall not have to pay it, by the terms of the contract, 
as I shall not yet have gained my first law-suit. 

Loomis, A. W. — Loomis, of Pittsburgh, ranked high 
among the best men of his time as a brilliant orator. His 
professional custom was never to bring suit until he had 
given the debtor notice and a reasonable time to pay. 
On one occasion, having notified a debtor, who shortly 
paid without suit, Loomis deducted Hve per cent, for his 
fee. His client remonstrating that the fee was too much 
when he had so little trouble, and plenty of attorneys 
would collect for two per cent., Loomis replied: 

" Oh, yes, and so would I collect for two per cent.; but 
when I collect and pay over the money I charge five per 
cent." 

MacNally, Leonard.— In Ireland, more than a cen- 
tury ago, the vade-mecum of justices of the peace, under 
which they dispensed justice indifferently — very indif- 
ferently — was Leonard MacNally's " Justice of the Peace 
in Ireland." As originally published, it was full of errors, 
and those who acted on it often found themselves drawn 
into law-suits, as defendants. 

" What could make you act so ? " MacNally would ask. 

" Faith, sir, I acted on the advice of your own book ! " 

Not much taken aback, for such scenes were frequent, 
MacNally would say: 

" As a human work, the book has errors, no doubt — but 
I shall correct them all when it comes to a second edition" 

MacNally was very short and nearly as broad as long. 
His legs were of unequal length, and he had a face which 
no washing could clean, and he wanted one thumb. He 
had good eyes and an expressive countenance. He was 
lame, also, which made Curran say, when he entered the 



BENCH AND BAR. 309 

lawyers' corps, in 1798, that he ran a chance of being shot 
for disobedience of orders, because when the adjutant 
would cry " March," MacNally would certainly " halt ! " 

Attorney Parsons was lame — one leg being shorter 
than the other. Limping up to Curran, he inquired for 
a brother barrister who was similarly affected : 
" Curran, did you see MacEally going this way ? " 
u Why," replied Curran, " I never saw him going any 
other way." 

When MacNally walked rapidly, he would take two 
thumping steps with the short leg, to bring up the space 
made by the long one ; and from this the bar nicknamed 
him "One pound two." 

Mansfield, Lord. — It was said of Lord Mansfield 
that " his statement of the facts of a case was worth the 
argument of any other man." He was the greatest jurist 
of his time, and one of the wittiest. 

An abstract from Mansfield's speech on the Delays of 
Justice hy the Privilege of Parliament shows the spirit 
that animated his conduct in life: 

" If the noble lord means by popularity that applause 
bestowed by after ages on good and virtuous actions, I 
have long been struggling in that race ; to what purpose 
all-trying time can alono determine. But if the noble 
lord means the mushroom popularity that is raised with- 
out merit, and lost without a crime, he is much mistaken 
in his opinion. I defy the noble lord to point out a single 
action of my life where the popularity of the times ever 
had the smallest influence on my determinations. I thank 
God I have a more permanent and steady rule for my 
conduct — the dictates of my own breast. Those that 
have foregone that pleasing adviser, and given up the 



310 WIT AND HUMOR. 

mind to be the slave of every popular impulse, I sincerely 
pity. I pity them still more, if their vanity leads them 
to mistake the shouts of a mob for the trumpet of fame. 
Experience might have informed them that many who 
have been saluted with the huzzas of a crowd one day 
have received their execrations the next; and many who, 
by the popularity of their times, have been held up as 
spotless patriots, have nevertheless appeared upon the 
historian's page, when truth has triumphed over delusion, 
the assassins of liberty." 

An old army officer had been appointed governor of a 
West India island. The most important duty which the 
governor had to perform was the administration of jus- 
tice. In his ignorance he addressed Mansfield in a voice 
of great concern, saying that he knew nothing of law, 
and asking what he should do as the presiding officer of 
the court of chancery on the island. 

" Decide promptly," said Mansfield, "but never give 
any reasons for your decisions. Your decisions may be 
right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong." 

Sir Fletcher Norton was well known for his lack of 
suaviter in modo. Once when pleading before Mansfield 
on some question of manorial right, he had the misfort- 
une to say: 

" My lord, I can illustrate the point in an instant in my 
own person; I myself have two little manors — " 

"We all know it, Sir Fletcher," the judge interposed 
with a smile. 

A common sailor, testifying in an action growing out 

of a collision between two ships, said : 

" At the time I was standing abaft the binnacle." 
Whereupon Mansfield, desiring to master the facts of 

the case, observed: 



BENCH AND BAR. 311 

" Stay a minute ; you say that at the time in question 
you were standing abaft the binnacle; now tell me, where 
is abaft the binnacle ? " 

This was too much for the gravity of "the salt," who 
immediately before climbing into the witness-box had 
taken a copious draught of neat rum. Removing his 
eyes from the bench, and turning round upon the crowded 
court with an expression of intense amusement, he ex- 
claimed at the top of his voice : 

" He's a pretty fellow for a judge ! Bless my jolly old 
eyes ! — you have got a pretty sort of a land-lubber for a 
judge ! He wants me to tell him where abaft the binna- 
cle is ! " 

JSTot less amused than the witness, Mansfield rejoined : 

"Well, my friend, you must fit me for my office by 
telling me where abaft the binnacle is; you've already 
shown me the meaning of half seas over." 

Mansfield, wishing to save a man who had stolen a 
watch, directed the jury to value it at ten/pence. 

" Tenpence, my lord," cried the prosecutor indignantly, 
" why, the very fashion of it cost me five pounds ! " 

" Oh," said the judge blandly, " but we must not hang 
a man for fashion's sake." 

With a show of ill-humor, Mansfield revenged himself 
on Dr. Brocklesby, who, whilst standing in the witness- 
box of the court of King's Bench, incurred his lordship's 
displeasure by referring to their private intercourse. 
Some accounts say that the medical witness merely nod- 
ded to him, as he might have done with propriety had 
they been taking seats at a convivial table ; other accounts, 
with less appearance of probability, maintain that, in a 
voice audible to the bar, he reminded his lordship of cer- 
tain jolly hours which they had spent together during the 



312 WIT AND HUMOR. 

previous evening. Mansfield showed his resentment in 
his "summing-up," by thus addressing the jury: 

" The next witness is one Eocklesby, or Brocklesby — 
Brocklesby or Eocklesby, I am not sure which ; and first, 
he swears that he is a physician." 

A Jew was suing a Christian for debt before Mansfield. 
The defendant pleaded that the debt was really owing, 
but the Jew had no right by the laws of England to bring 
an action. 

"Well," said Mansfield, "have you no other plea?" 

".No, my lord; I insist upon this plea." 

" Then you are the greater Jew of the two." 

A man who knows the world will not only make the 
most of everything he does know, but of many things he 
does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit 
mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his 
awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition. In Scotland, 
the "jus et norma loquendi " has made it the fashion to 
pronounce the law term curator, curator. Lord Mansfield 
gravely corrected a certain Scotch barrister when in 
court, reprehending what appeared to English usage a 
false quantity, by repeating — " Curator, sir, if you please." 

The barrister immediately replied : " I am happy to be 
corrected by so great an orator as your lordship." 

While Mansfield was holding court on the circuit, a 
poor woman was indicted for witchcraft. The inhabit- 
ants of the place were exasperated against her. Some 
witnesses deposed that they had seen her walk in the air, 
with her feet upward and her head downward. Mans- 
field heard the evidence with great tranquillity, and per- 
ceiving the temper of the people, whom it would not have 
been prudent to irritate, he thus addressed them: 

" I do not doubt that this woman has walked in the air 



BENCH AND BAR. 313 

with her feet upward, since you have all seen it, but she 
has the honor to be born in England, as well as you and 
I, and consequently cannot be judged but by the laws of 
the country, nor punished but in proportion as she has 
violated them. Now, I know not one law which forbids 
walking in the air with feet upward. We have all a right 
to do if with impunity. I see no reason, therefore, for 
this prosecution, and this poor woman may return home 
when she pleases." 
Her life was saved. 

Sergeant Hill, of great ability in black-letter law, was 
a good mark for Mansfield. " I have seen the sergeant," 
says Hawkins, " standing up in the court, immovable as 
a statue, and looking at no object, and arguing in sup- 
port of his client's case, so wrapt up in the workings of 
his own mind as, seemingly at least, to be insensible to 
any objects around him. In the midst of his argument, 
which was frequently so perplexed by parenthesis within 
parenthesis as to excite the laughter of the whole court, 
Mansfield would interrupt him with: 'Mr. Sergeant.' 

" He was rather deaf ; the words were repeated without 
effect. At length the counsel sitting near him would tell 
him that his lordship spoke to him. This roused him. 
Mansfield would then address him with: 

" ' The court hopes that your cold is better.' " 

During a trial, Mansfield covered his retreat from an 
untenable position with a sparkling bit of pleasantry. An 
old witness named Elm having testified with remarkable 
clearness, although more than eighty years of age, Mans- 
field asked him as to his mode of living, and found that 
throughout life he had been an early riser, and a singu- 
larly temperate man: 

"Ay," observed his lordship in a tone of approval; " I 



314 WIT AND HUMOR. 

have always found that, without temperance and early 
habits, longevity is never attained." 

The elder brother of this model of temperance was the 
next witness called ; and he almost surpassed the former 
in the clearness of his evidence. 

" I suppose," observed Mansfield, " that you also are an 
early riser ? " 

" No, my lord; I like my bed at all hours, and specially 
I like it in the morning." 

"Ah! but like your brother you are very temperate?" 
quickly asked the judge, looking out anxiously for the 
more important part of his theory. 

" My lord," responded this ancient Elm, disdaining to 
plead guilty to the charge of habitual sobriety, "I am a 
very old man with a memory clear as a bell, but I can't 
remember the night when I went to bed without being 
more or less intoxicated." 

Mansfield was silent. 

"Ah ! my lord," Mr. Dunning exclaimed, " this old man's 
case supports a theory upheld by many persons, that ha- 
bitual intemperance is favorable to longevity." 

" No, no," replied his lordship with a smile, " this old 
man and his brother merely teach us what every carpen- 
ter knows — that Elm, wet or dry, is a very tough wood." 

Marshall, John. — Simplicity and gentleness were 
marked characteristics of Marshall, the great Chief Jus- 
tice of the Supreme Court of the United States. " In wit. 
a man, simplicity a child," beautifully expresses his whole 
life. His wit was wisdom, and his wisdom wit. 

At the first meeting of the Supreme Court of the 
United States at Washington in February, 1801, Marshall 
sat as Chief Justice. " His appearance upon the bench," 
says Mr. Carson, "was an epoch in the history of the 



BENCH AND BAR. 315 

constitution. The hours of provincialism were num- 
oered. The glory and strength of the nation were to- 
come, and the decisions of the great Chief Justice, in 
which he explained, defended and enforced the constitu- 
tion, were to shed upon the ascending pathway of the 
republic the combined lustre of learning, intelligence 
and integrity. ' The Providence of God,' said Mr. Bin- 
ney, 'is shown most beneficently to the world in raising 
up from time to time, and in> crowning with length of 
days, men of pre-eminent goodness and wisdom.' " 

Mr. Petigru says of him: "Though his authority as 
Chief Justice of the United States was protracted beyond 
the ordinary term of public life, no man dared to covet 
his place, or express a wish to see it filled by another. 
Even the spirit of party respected the unsullied purity of 
the judge, and the fame of the Chief Justice has justified 
the wisdom of the constitution, and reconciled the Jeal- 
ousy of Freedom to the Independence of the Judiciary." 

Marshall was appointed Chief Justice at the age of 
forty-five. His appearance at that date is described by 
William Wirt: 

" The Chief Justice of the United States is in his per- 
son tall, meagre, emaciated ; his muscles so relaxed as not 
only to disqualify him apparently for any vigorous exer- 
tion of body, but to destroy everything like harmony in 
his whole appearance and demeanor, dress, attitude, gest- 
ure ; sitting, standing or walking he is far removed from 
the idolized graces of Lord Chesterfield as any other gen- 
tleman on earth. His head and face are small in propor- 
tion to his height ; his complexion swarthy ; the muscles 
of his face being relaxed, make him appear to be fifty 
years of age. His countenance has a faithful expression 
of good humor and hilarity, while his black eyes, that 



316 WIT AND HUMOR 

unerring index, possess an irradiating spirit, which pro- 
claims the imperial powers of the mind that sits en- 
throned within." 

Wirt again says of him : " This extraordinary man, with- 
out the aid of fancy, without the advantages of person, 
voice, attitude, gesture, or any of the ornaments of an 
orator, deserves to be considered as one of the most elo- 
quent men in the world, if eloquence may be said to con- 
sist in the power of seizing the attention with irresistible 
force, and never permitting it to elude the rrasp until the 
hearer has received the conviction which the speaker in- 
tends. His voice is dry and hard; his attitude, in his 
most effective orations, was often extremely awkward; 
while all his gestures proceeded from his right arm and 
consisted merely in a perpendicular swing of it, from 
about the elevation of his head to the bar, behind which 
he was accustomed to stand. As to fancy, if she holds a 
seat in his mind at all, his gigantic genius tramples with 
disdain on all her flower-decked plots and blooming par- 
terres. How then, you will ask, how is it possible that 
such a man can hold the attention of an audience en- 
chained through a speech of even ordinary length ? I 
will tell you. He possesses one original and almost super- 
natural faculty: the faculty of developing a subject by a 
single glance of his mind, and detecting at once the very 
point on which every controversy depends. No matter 
what the question, though ten times more knotty than 
* the gnarled oak,' the lightning of heaven is not more 
rapid or more resistless than his astonishing penetration. 
Nor does the exercise of it seem to cost him an effort. 
On the contrary, it is as easy as vision. I am persuaded 
that his eyes do not fly over a landscape and take in its 
various objects with more promptitude and facility than 
his mind embraces and analyzes the most complex sub- 
ject." 



BENCH AND BAR. 317 

Marshall's rulings in the Burr trial were bitterly as- 
sailed. " Marshall," said "Wirt, " has stepped in between 
Burr and death." In the light of the present, " when the 
passions and prejudices of the hour have perished, it is 
possible to form a calm judgment of the matter, and it is 
not too much to assert that the august figure of Marshall 
presented the impersonation of unbending, inflexible jus- 
tice." 

" Why did you not tell Judge Marshall that the people 
of America demanded a conviction?" was the quest'on 
put to Wirt after the Burr trial. 

" Tell him that. I would as soon have gone to Her- 
schel and told him that the people of America insisted 
that the moon had horns, as a reason why he should draw 
her with them." 

False pride — if indeed any sort of pride is otherwise — 
is a very ridiculous littleness. There are men who would 
blush up to the eyes if detected in carrying home a bun- 
dle. Yet this sort of pride frequently has a fall, and 
necessity sometimes works a radical cure. One of our 
dandy officers in Mexico, who, when in New York, voted 
it vulgar to carry an umbrella, made nothing of marching 
to his quarters the bearer of a roasting pig and greens, 
captured in a foraging excursion. Marshall, while living 
in Eichmond, gave a lesson to one of these overnice gen- 
try. Nothing was more usual than to see him returning 
at sunrise with poultry in one hand and vegetables in the 
other. On one of these occasions, a would-be fashionable 
young man from the North, who had recently removed to 
Richmond, was swearing violently because he could hire 
no one to take home his turkey. Marshall stepped up, 
and, ascertaining where he lived, replied : 

" That is the way, and I will take it for you." 



518 WIT AND HUMOR. 

On arriving at his dwelling, the young man inquired 

"What shall I pay you?" 

" O, nothing," was the rejoinder; " you are welcome — 
it w r as on my way, and no trouble." 

" Who was that polite old gentleman who brought 
home my turkey for me," inquired the other of a by- 
stander, as Marshall stepped away. 

" That," replied he, " is John Marshall, Chief Justice of 
the United States." 

The young man, astounded, exclaimed: 

" Why did he bring home my turkey? " 

" To give you a severe reprimand, and teach you to 
attend to your own business," was the answer. 

John Randolph, differing from Marshall in political 
creed, unwittingly paid him a compliment when he heard 
some one criticising an opinion of the Chief Justice: 

"Yes, sir," said Eandolph, "it is all wrong; but then 
there is no man in the United States who can show 
wherein it is wrong." 

Marshall noticed that his carriage horses were very 
thin, and he was advised by friends that his coachman 
sold their provender. Encountering this individual, he 
said to him: "John, my horses seem very thin and poor. 
How is this, John ? " 

" Well, old massa, I can't splain it; dey gits plenty to 
eat, I tell you, massa." 

" Well, John, and here's Col. Picket's horses, they seem 
very fat." 

" I gwine try and splain dat to you, massa. Dey's like 
dey massa and missus. D'ar Col. Picket, he's fat, and 
his wife she fat too, and so dey horses keeps fat, of course ; 
and you know, old massa, you's po' and scrawny, and 
ol' missus, she's po' and scrawny, too. so in course yo' 
horses dey's po' and scrawny." 



BENCH AND BAR. 319 

"Well, John," said Marshall, with a bland smile, "I 
never heard it explained in that way before. I must 
think over it." 

And he yielded the field to John. 

Marshall, Thomas P.— Marshall was one of the 
great leaders of the Kentucky bar — a noble, good-hearted 
fellow, brimful of sparkling humor that never failed to 
amuse even his political opponents. 

"When Marshall was delivering a political speech to a 
large audience in Buffalo, some one every few minutes 
shouted : 

" Louder ! louder ! " 

Marshall stood this for a while; but at last, turning 
gravely to the presiding officer, said : 

" Mr. Chairman: At the last day, when the angel shall, 
with his golden trumpet, proclaim that ' time shall be no 
longer,' I doubt not, sir, that there will be in that vast 
crowd, as now, some drunken fool from Buffalo, shouting 
' Louder ! louder ! ' " 

Marshall went on with his speech, but there were no 
more cries of " louder ! " 

At another meeting, Marshall had made but little prog- 
ress before he was assailed with a torrent of abuse by 
an Irishman in the crowd. Not at all disconcerted, Tom 
sung at the top of his voice : 

" Be jabbers, that's me fren' Pat Murphy, the man that 
spells God with a little ' g ' and Murphy with a big ' M.' " 

This floored Pat, amidst roars of laughter. 

Marshall was once a candidate against General Pilcher. 
The General made a telling speech, replete with eloquence, 
and closed by telling his audience that he had been raised 
a plain country lad, and had never been to school more 



320 WIT AND HUMOR. 

than about three months in his life. Marshall arose, and, 
in a humorous way, remarked: 

"My friend has told you that his school education was 
confined to the short period of three months' time; for 
myself I was much surprised to hear that the gentleman 
had ever been to school." 

Marshall, Thomas M.— The death of Marshall, of 
Pennsylvania, in 1898, at the age of seventy-nine, was 
the passing away of a great figure at the bar and on the 
stump ; but not a passing as in ordinary lives, for his mem- 
ory lives with those who knew him, " sweet as the melody 
of far-away bells." The record of his life-work is in- 
delibly stamped on the history of his state. He was one 
of the most gifted advocates and orators of his time, his 
wit, humor, wisdom and pathos swaying the reason and 
touching the heart. 

Marshall possessed an eloquence of rare power. Pathos, 
as a friend has so well said of him, was his strong card. 
The picture of that tall, rugged old man, with his flow- 
ing gray hair and erect figure, the tears rolling down his 
cheeks, his voice quivering with emotion, and his hands 
stretched beseechingly toward the jury, is one that thou- 
sands of people recall. He could pull out the tremolo 
stop and throw the court room into a moist, gray atmos- 
phere with less trouble and more fervor than any actor 
who treads the 'stage. Desolate homes, lonely children, 
weeping widows and heart-broken mothers could be con- 
jured up by " Old Tom " with a sweep of that eloquent 
right arm. He could cloud up and rain with startling 
suddenness, and make other people do it too. 

A fine description of Marshall's methods in attacking 
a jury by the rain route is given by Mr. "Watson of the 



BENCH AND BAR. 321 

Pittsburgh bar. His description will hold good for any 
of the many murder cases in which Marshall was engaged. 
His method was almost always the same. Always tears 
and pathos ; always reaching the jury; never overdoing it. 

" Marshall and I were on opposite sides of a case in 
which a boy named Luster was tried for murdering an- 
other boy at Becks Eun. Marshall told the jury in the 
most pathetic and impressive manner about his own home 
life on Perrysville road, and about his own family. He 
described how he would go home after a hard day's 
work. His daughter would have his dressing gown and 
his boy would have his slippers. Presently his other two 
sons would come in, rosy and full of spirits, and the fam- 
ily would spend a happy evening together. Then he 
asked the jury if they wouldn't go home the same way, 
and to the same home comforts. He asked them if they 
loved their sons. He drew an eloquent picture of the 
strength of home ties. Then he said : 

" ' Gentlemen, this is probably the last time I will ad- 
dress a jury in Allegheny county.' (I believe it was, too.) 
' 1 have lived the allotted span of three score years and ten. 
I am an old man and am nearing the evening of life. I am 
about to enjoy the leisure I think I have fairly earned.' 
He stopped. His lips twitched and the tears ran down 
his face. ' I want you men to let me take that boy home 
to his mother to-night,' he continued. And then he sat 
down. 

" We were licked, of course. You couldn't have done 
a thing with that jury. I was beaten, but I am proud of 
it. He did take that boy home, too, and it wasn't twenty 
minutes afterward." 

" Glorious Old Tom " he was called in his latter years; 
and as such he will always be remembered. One clay a 
friend sa;d to him : " Mr. Marshall, why do you allow peo- 
21 



322 WIT AND HUMOR. 

pie to speak of you as ' Old Tom Marshall ? ' I wouldn't 
have it." 

Mr. Marshall laughed in his hearty, characteristic man- 
ner and replied : " A man should never object to the truth. 
I am old. There's no question about that. I've been 
called Tom since I was able to walk. 'Old Thomas' 
wouldn't sound right; now, would it? Better let the 
name stand as it is." 

" Aren't you afraid of being hauled up for contempt of 
court, Mr. Marshall," asked a friend one day, who heard 
him roar away at a well-known judge for taking excep- 
tion to one of his statements to the jury. 

"Contempt of court," said Marshall, with another ex- 
plosion. " I'm not afraid of any court, sir." 

Judge Stowe, before whom he tried many cases, says: 
" The secret of Marshall's success was getting to the level 
of the jury, gauging his men, and talking to them accord- 
ingly. If he had a jury of old staid Presbyterians, he 
quoted scripture by the yard. He was solemn and dig- 
nified. His long right arm would shake warningly be- 
fore the railing as he delivered some Biblical quotation 
with impressiveness befitting a Covenanter minister. If 
he had a jury of workingmen he talked to them accord- 
ingly. They were 'honest sons of toil;' and he made 
them feel that he was a day-laborer himself. He tem- 
pered himself according to the temperament of the men 
before him. He could be grave and gay, wise and witty." 

During the trial of a murder case, Marshall became 
excited at the court's ruling on a matter of evidence. 

The judge took offence: 

" Be careful, Mr. Marshall," said he, " or you will be in 
contempt of court." 

" I am, sir," retorted Marshall, with withering empha- 
sis, " in the deepest contempt of court." 



BENCH AND BAR. 323 

A man in the back part of the room snickered. " Bring 
that man here," demanded the judge sharply. He was 
fined ten dollars for contempt of court. Marshall went 
on with his examination of the witness with the placid- 
ness of a summer morning. After these little explosions 
he would always be the height of amiability — until the 
next decision disagreed with him. 

Marshall was combative by nature, and nothing pleased 
him better than a good stiff brush with the attorney for 
the other side. During the progress of a case he had a 
habit of walking around the court room, with his head 
bent in thought. Once in a while such a fit of restless- 
ness would strike him as would drive a nervous man al- 
most frantic : 

" Why don't you sit down, Mr. Marshall ? You make 
me nervous ! " exclaimed a nervous attorney in the crim- 
inal court one day. 

"Can't help it," said Marshall. "I started to walk 
around a court room before you were born. I may or 
may not keep it up after you are dead, but I won't stop 



Mason, Jeremiah. — Mason was a great man — in 
Webster's opinion the greatest of his time. 

Mr. Curtis, in his "Life of Webster," says: " I well rec- 
ollect a description Mr. Webster once gave me of a change 
which he said he deliberately made in his own style of 
speaking and writing. He observed that before he went 
to Portsmouth his style was florid, — he even used the 
word < vicious,' — and that he was apt to make longer 
sentences and to use longer words than were needful. 
He soon began, however, to notice that Mr. Mason was, 
as he expressed it, 'a cause-getting' man. 'He had a 



324 WIT AND HUMOR. 

habit,' said Webster, ' of standing quite near to the jury, 
so near that he might have laid his finger on the fore- 
man's nose; and then he talked to them in a plain con- 
versational way, in short sentences, and using no word 
that was not level to the comprehension of the least edu- 
cated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own 
st} 7 le, and I set about reforming it altogether.' " 

Judge Story, in the first edition of his Commentaries on 
Equity Pleadings, pays a fine tribute to Mason : 

" I esteem it a great privilege to have the opportunity 
of dedicating this work to you. Few circumstances in 
my life could be more grateful than those which enable 
me to inscribe on the pages which contain my own im- 
perfect judicial labors the memorials of my private friend- 
ships, as well as the avowals of my reverence for the 
great, the good, and the wise. Your own enviable dis- 
tinction, so long held in the first rank of the profession, 
and supported by an ability and depth and variety of 
learning which have had few equals, and to which no 
one can bear a more prompt and willing testimony than 
myself, would alone entitle you to a far higher tribute 
than any I can bestow. I well know that I speak but 
the common voice of the profession on this subject; for 
they have well understood the vigor and the weight of 
that lucid argumentation which has spoken in language 
for the cause, and not merely for its ornament : Neque 
id ipsum, tarn leporis causa, quam ponderis. But I con- 
fess myself more anxious to be allowed to consider this 
dedication as a tribute to your exalted private worth, 
spotless integrity, and inflexible public principles, as well 
as a free expression of my own gratitude for your uni- 
form friendship ; — a friendship which commenced with 
my first entrance among the Bar, in which you were then 
the acknowledged leader (a period when the value of 



BENCH AND BAR. 325 

such unexpected kindness could not but be deeply felt 
and fully appreciated), and which has continued undi- 
minished up to the present hour. Such reminiscences are 
to me more precious than any earthly honors. They 
fade not with the breath of popular applause ; and they 
cheer those hours which, as age approaches, are naturally 
devoted to reflections upon the past for instruction as 
well as for consolation." 

While Mason was trying a case, the judge interposed 
with a question to a witness. Mason promptly checked 
the reply, and, turning to the court, said: 

" On which side does your honor put that question ? 
If for the other side, we object to it as inadmissible; and 
if for us, we don't want it." 

On being asked what he thought of a judicial appoint- 
ment, he replied: 

" He'll make a slow judge." 

" Do you mean, Mr. Mason, that his mental processes 
are slow ? " 

" No, it's not that ; but he'll have twice as much to do 
as most other judges. He'll have first to decide what's 
right, and then to decide whether he'll do it." 

One of the brilliant lawyers of Mason's time was Icha- 
bod Bartlett. It is said that after Bartlett had addressed 
the jury, Mason would put one foot on a chair, colloquially 
state the case, advert to Bartlett's address as all very fine 
talk, and then, stretching his wonderful form across the 
bar, would add : " But, gentlemen of the jury, what my 
brother Bartlett has told you is not law." 

He was once engaged in a famous trial in which some 
good Methodist brethren were concerned. One morning, 
when the court opened, an over-zealous friend came to 



326 WIT AND HUMOR. 

him, and in a solemn whisper said: " Mr. Mason, I had a 
vision last night. Gabriel appeared to me and told me 
that brother A. was innocent. Eo mistake about it." 
" Subpoena him as a witness at once," said Mason. 

Rev. Avery, charged with murder, was defended by 
Mason in a masterly manner, resulting in an acquittal. 
Some time after the trial, a friend of Mason ventured 
to ask him if he thought Avery was innocent ; to which 
Mason replied with a smile: 

" Upon my word, I never thought of it in that light be- 
fore." 

i Maule, George. — Nothing would restrain Justice 
Maule, if an out-of-the-way notion came into his head, es- 
pecially if it was a satirical one. On a question of costs 
coming before him, he remarked: 

" This seems to me quite a novel application. I am 
asked to declare what amounts to this: that, in an action 
by A. against B., C, who seems to have less to do with 
the case than even I have, ought to pay the costs. I do 
not believe any such absurd law has ever been laid down — 
although, it is true, I have not yet seen the last number of 
the Queen's Bench Reports." 

A witness who had given his evidence in such a way as 
satisfied everybody in court that he was committing per- 
jury, being cautioned by Maule, said at last: 

" My lord, you may believe me or not, but I have stated 
not a word that is false, for I have been wedded to truth 
from my infancy." 

" Yes," said Maule, " but the question is, how long have 
you been a widower ? " 

A sergeant opened a case very confusedly before Maule. 
"I wish, sir," interrupted his honor, "you would put 



BENCH AND BAR. 327 

your facts in some order; chronological order is the best; 
but I am not particular. Any order you like — alpha- 
betical order." 

" Nominal damages are in effect only a peg to hang costs 



In his charge to the jury in a libel case, Maule, refer- 
ring to a defendant who had exhibited a spiteful piety, 
said: 

" One of these defendants is, it seems, a minister of re- 
ligion ; of what religion does not appear ; but to judge by 
his conduct it cannot be any form of Christianity." 

Maxims. — " Admitting yourself out of court" A legal 
phrase signifying a liberality of concession to your oppo- 
nent, by which you destroy your own cause. This excess 
of candor was well illustrated by the Irishman who boasted 
that he had often skated sixty miles a day. 

" Sixty miles ! " exclaimed a friend. " That is a great 
distance ; it must have been accomplished when the days 
were longest." 

" To be sure it was; I admit that ! " cried the ingenious 
Hibernian. 

"A man of straw" Many years ago men could be 
easily found to give any evidence upon oath that might 
be required, and some of these persons walked openly 
in Westminster Hall with a straw in one of their shoes, 
to signify that they wanted employment as witnesses. 
Hence originated, "He is a man of straw." But the cus- 
tom has high antiquity. A writer in the Quarterly Re- 
view^ vol. XXXIII, p. 344, on Greek courts, says : 

" We have all heard of a race of men who used in for- 
mer days to ply about our own courts of law, and who, 
from their manner of making known their occupation, 



328 WIT AND HUMOR. 

were recognized by the name of straw shoes. An advo- 
cate or lawyer who wanted a convenient witness knew by 
these signs where to find one, and the colloquy between 
the parties was brief. 'Don't you remember?' said the 
advocate. The party looked at the fee and gave no sign, 
but the fee increased, and the powers of memory increased 
with it. * To be sure I do.' ' Then come into court and 
swear it.' And straw shoes went into court and swore it. 
Athens abounded in straw shoes. 

" Though a straw in the shoe has ceased to be the dis- 
tinguishing mark, the records of many of our courts show 
that l men of straw ' still exist, and are easily found 
by those unprincipled enough to require their services. 
They are now, however, principally employed as bail, 
and * straw ' bail has become a familiar word in all our 
courts. Their false oath of the possession of property is 
often a ready means of snatching felons from the custody 
of the law." 

"A man's house is his castle" In the Third Institute, 
Coke says: "A man's house is his castle;" and in Se- 
mayne's Case, 5 Rep. 91 : " The house of every one is to 
him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence 
against injury and violence as for his repose." 

A seedy Irishman was boasting of the baronial castle 
at his old home in Ireland : 

"Yis," said a witty pettifogger, "it was a foine castle; 
you could stick your arm down the chimney and open 
the front dure." 

Chatham made a splendid use of this maxim in a speech 
on the Excise Bill : 

" The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to 
all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail ; it's roof 
may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm 



BENCH AND BAR. 329 

may enter ; the rain may enter, but the King of England 
cannot enter ! All his force dare not cross the threshold 
of the ruined tenement." 

Grattan said of Burke : " He became at last such an 
enthusiastic admirer of kingly power that he could not 
have slept comfortably upon his pillow if he had not 
thought that the king had a right to carry it off from 
under his head." 

"A man who is his own lawyer hath a fool for a client." 
Mr. M brought suit against the South Carolina Kail- 
road to recover damages for injuries to his property. 
Losing it in the Superior Court, he carried it to the Su- 
preme Court, where he represented his own cause and 
began his argument by saying: 

" May it please the court, there is an old French adage 
that ' A man who is his own lawyer hath a fool for a 
client.'" 

The following week the Supreme Court pronounced its 

decision, adverse to M , who, then absent in Augusta, 

was telegraphed by his friend, Judge McLaws, as fol- 
lows: 

"Judgment for defendant in error. French adage af- 
firmed by Supreme Court." 

" A personal action dies with the person? This maxim 
is clear enough ; and means that an action brought against 
a man, when he dies in the middle of it, cannot be con- 
tinued. Thus, though the law sometimes, and very often, 
pursues a man to the grave, his rest there is not likely to 
be disturbed by the lawyers. If a soldier dies in action, 
the action does not necessarily cease, but is often con- 
tinued with considerable vigor afterward. 

" Comparisons are odious." Judge to constable: 

" What sort of a man was it committed the assault ? " 



330 WIT ^D HUMOR. 

"Your honor, he was a small, on significant crathm\ 
about yer own size." 

" Cor (mi non judice." Judge Lowry, of North Carolina, 
while at the bar, unexpectedly lost a case for a client who 
was a justice of the peace, and, in his own opinion, a very 
learned one. The judge was at a loss how to explain the 
cause satisfactorily to him when they met, but he did it 
as follows: "Squire, I could not explain it exactly to an 
ordinary man, but to an intelligent man like you, who is 
so well posted in law and law phrases, I need only say 
that the judge said that the case was coram non judice" 
"Ah," said the client, looking very wise and drawing a 
long breath, "if things had got into that fix, Mr. Lowry, 
I think we did very well to get out of it as easy as we 
did." 

"Deceit and fraud shall be remedied on all occasions" 
It may be very true that deceit and fraud ought to be 
remedied, but whether they are is quite another question. 
It is much to be feared that in law, as well as in other 
matters, ought sometimes stands for nothing. 

"Error, unrepentant, must be destroyed." A Missouri 
judge begins a recent opinion: "' Delenda est Carthago. 1 
Error, unrepentant, must be destroyed. Gentle reader, if 
you have ever chanced to wander through the wilder- 
ness of undigested volumes which Judge Leonard on one 
occasion said were not law bpoks, but only Missouri Be- 
ports, you mayhap have encountered the case of Hick- 
man v. Green, 123 Mo. 165. If not, it shall be my pleas- 
ing task now to unfold to you the prominent points and 
salient characteristics of that cause celebre." 145 Mo. 300. 

"Fiat justitia, ruat coelum." Let justice be done, 
though the heavens fall. A maxim made famous by Lord 



BENCH AND BAR. 331 

Mansfield, in his decision in the Wilkes case, in which 
Wilkes had been sentenced to outlawry without having 
been present in court. Mansfield asserted the constitu- 
tional right of an Englishman to a public trial in the 
presence of the accused, and in his opinion, reversing the 
sentence, said: 

" The constitution does not allow reasons of state to in- 
fluence our judgment. God forbid it should! We must 
not regard political consequences, however formidable 
they might be ; if rebellion was the certain consequence, 
we are bound to say, ' Justitiafiat, ruat coelum? " 

At a dinner given the judges, part of the ceiling came 
down, and Joseph Jekyll, the witty barrister, raised a 
laugh by saying : 

" Fiat justitia, ruat coelum." 

" Give the devil his due." This phrase was turned very 
wittily by a member of the bar in North Carolina on 
three of his legal brethren. During the trial, Hillman, 
Dews and Swain (the first named distinguished lawyers, 
the last also a distinguished lawyer and president of the 
university of that state) handed James Dodge, the clerk 
of the Supreme Court, the following epitaph : 

Here lies James Dodge, who dodged all good, 

And never dodged an evil; 
And after dodging all he could, 

He could not dodge the deviL 

Mr. Dodge sent back to the gentlemen the annexed 
impromptu reply: 

Here lies a Hillman and a Swain, 

Their lot let no man choose; 
They lived in sin and died in pain, 

And the devil got his dues (Dews). 

"Hear both sides." It was before an Irish trial justice: 
The plaintiff's attorney had made an eloquent and log- 



332 WIT AND HUMOR. 

ical argument. Then the defendant's counsel took the 
floor. 

"What are you doing,*' asked the justice, as the lawyer 
began. 

" Going to present our side of the case." 

"I don't want to hear both sides argued. It has a 
tindincy to confuse the coort." 

An artful juryman, addressing the clerk of the court 
while the latter was administering the oath, said: 

" Speak up; I cannot hear what you say." 

" Stop," said Baron Alderson from the bench, " are you 
deaf?" 

" Yes, my lord, in one ear." 

"Then leave the box; it is necessary that jurymen 
should hear both sides." 

But this would not apply to grand jurymen. They hear 
but one side. 

Sydney Smith was a guest in a house where Lord 
Plunket, an eminent Irish judge, was expected. Before 
dinner a note arrived, saying that his lordship was unable 
to keep the appointment, a dog having rushed out of the 
crowd and bitten him in the leg. When the note was 
read aloud, Smith observed: 

" I should like to hear the dog's account of the story." 

There are two sides to every issue — the wrong side 
and our side. 

In the case of a defendant who sought to escape liabil- 
ity for certain expenditure by throwing the blame of 
ordering it upon his wife, Justice Stephen, of England, 
characteristically blurted out: 

" That is a very old excuse. I often felt that Adam — 
I mean — that is — well! I have always wished to hear 
Eve's account of that transaction." 



BENCH AND BAR. -J33 

" Ignorance of the law excuses no one? Once when J ames 
T. Brady pleaded a client's ignorance of the law in ex- 
tenuation of an offence he had committed, the judge said: 
"Every man is presumed to know the law, Mr. Brady." 
" I am aware of that, your honor. Every shoemaker, 
tailor, mechanic, and illiterate laborer is presumed to 
know the law; every man is presumed to know it except 
judges of the Supreme Court; and we have a court of 
appeals to correct their mistakes." 

"The law, according to the well-known legal maxim," 
says the London Law Journal, " is a thing quod quisque 
scire tenetur. We may admit that the presumption of 
knowledge is somewhat strained in the case of laymen; 
but it is alarming to find an eminent queen's counsel, who 
has held high legal office, casting a doubt on her majes- 
ty's judges' knowledgs of the law. ' The judges,' said Sir 
Henry James during the discussion on the fourth clause 
of the Home Rule bill, 'know the common law — more 
or less,' he added, after a pause, amidst the laughter of 
an irreverent House of Commons." 

Justice : " You say you did not know that you were 
violating the law? Ah, but my dear sir, ignorance of the 
law is no excuse to any man." 

Prisoner: " That's kind o' rough on both of us, ain't it, 
judge ? " 

Crier: "Order in the court." 

" It is letter that ninety and nine guilty men should es- 
cape than that one innocent man should he punished." A 
lawyer once asked the late Judge Perkins, of Alabama, 
to charge the jury that " it is better that ninety and nine 
guilty men should escape than that one innocent man 
should be punished." 

"Yes," said the witty judge, "I will give that charge; 
but, in the opinion of the court, the ninety and nine guilty 
men have already escaped in this county." 



334 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" Let no innocent man escape" State v. Lewis, 19 Kan 
366, is a leading case on this maxim. The defendant, 
committed to jail for trial on a criminal charge, escaped 
before trial; and was subsequently arrested, tried and 
acquitted. This acquittal was held not to be a bar to an 
information for breaking jail and escaping from lawful 
custody. The Supreme Court reporter, in a note to the 
case, says: 

The peculiar features of the case justify the insertion 
of the poetical report written by Eugene F. "Ware, Esq., 
and published in the Fort Scott Daily Monitor. Mr. Ware's 
report is as follows : 

In the Supreme Ccurt, State of Kansas. 

George Lewis, Appellant, ads. The State op Kansas, Appellee. 

Appeal from Atchison County. 
Syllabus: 

Law — Paw; Guilt— Wilt. When upon thy frame the 
law — places its majestic paw — though in innocence op 
guilt — thou art then required to wilt. 

Statement of Case by Reporter: 
This defendant, while at large, 
Was arrested on a charge 
Of burglarious intent, 
And direct to jail he went. 
But he somehow felt misused, 
And through prison walls he oozed, 
And in some unheard-of shape 
He effected his escape. 

Mark you now; again the law 
On defendant placed its paw, 
Like a hand of iron mail, 
And resocked him into jail — 
Which said jail, while so corralled, 
He by sockage-tenure .held. 

Then the court met, and they tried 
Lewis up and down each side, 
On the good old-fashioned plan ; 
But the jury cleared the man. 



BENCH AND BAR. 335 



Now you think that this strange 
Ends at just about this place. 
Nay, not so. Again the law 
On defendant placed its paw — 
This time takes him round the cape 
For effecting an escape; 
He, unable to give bail, 
Goes reluctantly to jail. 

Lewis, tried for this last act, 
Makes a special plea of fact: 
" Wrongly did they me arrest, 
As my trial did attest, 
And while rightfully at large, 
Taken on a wrongful charge, 
I took back from them what they 
From me wrongly took away." 

When this special plea was heard, 
Thereupon The State demurred. 

The defendant then was pained 
When the court was heard to say, 
In a cold, impassive way, 
" The demurrer is sustained." 

Back to jail did Lewis go, 
But as liberty was dear, 
He appeals, and now is here 

To reverse the judge below. 
The opinion will contain 
All the statements that remain, 

Argument, and Brief of Appellant: 
As a matter, sir, of fact, 
Who was injured by our act, 
Any property or man ? 
Point it out, sir, if you can. 

Can you seize us when at large 
On a baseless, trumped-up charge; 
And if we escape, then say 
It is crime to get away, 



WIT AND HUMOR. 

When we rightfully regained 
What was wrongfully obtained? 
Please the court, sir, what is crime? 

What is right, and what is wrong? 

Is our freedom but a song, 
Or the s abject of a rhyme? 

Argument, and Brief of Attorney for The State: 

When The State, that is to say, 
We, take liberty away; 
When the padlock and the hasp 
Leaves one helpless in our grasp, 
It's unlawful then that he 
Even dreams of liberty — 
Wicked dreams that may in time 
Grow and ripen into crime — 
Crime of dark and damning shape; 
Then, if he perchance escape, 
Evermore remorse will roll 
O'er his shattered, sin-sick souX 

Please the court, sir, how can we 
Manage people who get free ? 

Reply of Appellant: 

Please the court, sir, if it's sin, 
Where does turpitude begin ? 

Opinion of the Court. Per Curiam: 

We — don't — make — law. We are bound 
To interpret it as found. 

The defendant broke away; 
When arrested he should stay. 

This appeal can't be maintained, 
For the record does not show 
Error in the court below, 
And we nothing can infer; 
Let the judgment be sustained: 
All the justices concur. 

{Note by the Reporter:) 

Of the sheriff, rise and sing, 
" Glory to our earthly king ! " 



BENCH AND BAR 33T 

"Marriage is made by consent? Scottish marriage law 
nas figured prominently in literary fiction, for it lends 
itself admirably in the way of plots for romances. In a 
case recently heard in the Probate and Divorce Court, in 
which one of the phases of the Scottish marriage laws was 
a prominent factor, a barrister gave evidence and quoted 
some very remarkable and amusing verses, which form a 
poetical epitome of the law of Scotland on the subject. 
It is entitled " The Tourists' Matrimonai Guide Through 
Scotland," and there is a refrain after each verse, " Woo'd 
and married and a'" : 

"This maxim itself might content ye — 

That marriage is made by consent, 
Provided it's done de prcesenti 

And marriage is really what's meant. 
Suppose that young Jockey and Jenny, 

Say ' We two are husband and wife,' 
The witnesses need't be many, 

They're instantly buckled for life. 

"Suppose the man only has spoken, 

The woman just given a nod, 
They're spliced by that very same token 

Till one of them's under the sod. 
Though words would be bolder and blunter, 

The want of them isn't a flaw, 
For nutu signisque loquuntur 

Is good consistorial law." 

The author was the late Lord leaves, an eminent Scot- 
tish judge. Scottish judges are generally supposed to be 
dour folk, but there has always been a fine strain of humor 
among them, as countless stories testify. 

"Messis seqtdtur sementem." A late venerable practi- 
tioner, who wanted to write a book, and was recom- 
mended to try his hand at a translation of Latin law 
maxims as a thing much wanted, translated messis sequi- 

22 



338 WIT AND HUMOR 

tur sementem, with a fine simplicity, into " the harvest 
follows the seed-time ; " and actor sequitur forum rei he 
made, " the agent must be in court when the case is going 
on." 

" One law for the rich, another for the poor." When Lord 
Ellenborough was trying one of the government cases 
against Home Tooke, he found occasion to praise the im- 
partial manner in which justice is administered. 

" In England, Mr. Tooke, the law is open to all men, 
rich or poor." 

" Yes, my lord," answered the prisoner, " and so is the 
London Tavern." 

Justice Maule, in passing sentence on a prisoner con- 
victed of bigamy, applies this maxim with a keen irony: 

Clerk of Assize: What have you to say why judgment 
should not be passed upon you according to law ? 

Prisoner: Well, my lord, my wife took up with a hawker 
and ran away five years ago, and I have never seen her 
since, and I married this woman last winter. 

Justice Maule : I will tell you what you ought to have 
-done; and if you say you did not know, I must tell you 
that the law conclusively presumes that you did. You 
•ought to have instructed your attorney to bring an action 
against the hawker for damages. That would have cost 
you about a hundred pounds. When you had recovered 
substantial damages against the hawker, you would have 
instructed your proctor to sue in the ecclesiastical courts 
for a divorce a mensa et thoro. That would have cost you 
two or three hundred pounds more. When you had ob- 
tained a divorce a mensa et thoro, you would have had to 
appear by counsel before the House of Lords for a divorce 
a vinculo matrimonii. The bill might have been opposed 
in all its stages in both Houses of Parliament ; and, alto- 



BENCH AND BAR. 339 

gether, you would have had to spend about a thousand or 
twelve hundred pounds. You will probably tell me that 
you never had a thousand farthings of your own in the 
world; but, prisoner, that makes no difference. Sitting 
here as a British judge, it is my duty to tell you that this 
is not a country in which there is one law for the rich and 
another for the poor. 

" Possession is nine points of the law." " You see, boss, 
dar's a nigger libin' up my way who orter be taken car' 
ob," said an old darkey to the judge at a police station. 

" What's he been doing now ? " 

"Wall, sah, las' fall I lent him my ax, and when I 
wanted it back he braced right up an' tole me that posses- 
sion was nine pints o' law, and refused to give it up." 

" Yes." 

" Well de odder day I sent de ole woman ober an' she 
borrowed his bucksaw, an' when Julius cum for it I tole 
him jist like he answered me, an' stood on my dignity." 

"Well?"' 

" I had nine pints o' law, didn't I ? " 

"Yes." 

" An' how many pints am de law composed of ? " 

" I don't know exactly." 

"Well, dat's what bodders me, for dat nigger sawdem 
nine pints, shet up dis lef eye for me, pitched de old 
woman over a bar'l, an' walked off wid his saw an' my 
snow-shovel to boot. If I had nine pints he mus' hev 
had over twenty, an' even den he didn't half let himself 
out." 

" The child is father of the man." If this be true, the 
maxim is likely to raise some knotty legal problems in 
the descent and distribution of estates. The child is 
father of the man. Hence the child would be paternal 
grandfather to the man's child. But the latter child, 



340 WIT AND HUMOR. 

being also father to the man, would be, therefore, his 
own paternal grandfather. Hence this latter child would 
have two paternal grandfathers, both children, of whom 
he himself was one. Now, this rule being universal, the 
other child would be likewise his own grandfather, and 
hence great-great-grandfather to the before-mentioned 
child. But these two children were each father to the 
man, a state of affairs which can be accounted for only 
on the ground that one of them was a stepfather. That 
is, they both married the same wife. It is presumable 
that the one who was great-great-grandfather of the other 
married her first, for if not, the other would have mar- 
ried one of his direct female ancestors before she was 
married. This borders on the improbable. It is, then, 
only left to assume that the child married his great-great- 
grandmother after the death of his great-great-gran 1- 
f ather. This brings us to a conclusion far more startling 
than that of Mr. Wordsworth, viz.: The child is step- 
great-great-grandfather to himself. So was it when the 
world began. If so, this is a convincing argument on 
the side of evolution. 

" The glorious uncertainty of the law." In 1756, soon 
after Lord Mansfield had overruled several ancient legal 
decisions and introduced many innovations in the practice, 
a barrister gave the famous toast, " The glorious uncer- 
tainty of the law." 

The same thought occurs in Macklin's Love a la Mode. 
Act II: 

" The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles 
in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious 
uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the 
justice of it." 

" The greater contains the less" Thus, if a man tenders 
more money than he ought to pay, he tenders what he 



BENCH AND BAR. 341 

owes : for the greater contains the less ; but a quart wine- 
bottle, which is greater than a pint and a half, does not 
always contain a pint and a half: so that, in this instance, 
the less is not contained in the greater. 

" The greater the truth, the greater the libel" Lord Mans- 
field's maxim is well illustrated in the following story: 

" Jim Webster appeared before a Galveston justice of 
the peace, and expressed his ardent desire to sue old 
Uncle Mose for damages." 

" What amount of damages have you sustained ? " asked 
the justice. 

" Dar is what I jess wanted to hold a caucus wid you 
about. I wanted to know, in de fust place, ef dat was a 
fac' dat de greater the troof de greater de libel, and de 
moah excessive de damages de injured party was entitled 
to?" 

" Yes, I believe that is the law." 

" Den in dat case old Mose has got to shell out foah 
million dollars before sundown, because, yer see, when he 
'lowed I was de most reskelly niggah on Galveston Island, 
he was guilty of telling so much troof dat foah millions 
ain't half as big as de libel, and de damages is bound to 
correspond wicl de injuriousness." 

The matter was afterwards arranged without prejudice 
to the honor of either party, by old Mose shelling out 
four bits' worth of sweet potatoes and a fine gold chro- 
nometer that cost two dollars at auction. 

" Old Mansfield, who writes like the Bible, 
Says, 'The more 'tis a truth, sir, the more 'tis a libel.' " 

— Old Rhyme. 

Lord Campbell, in his "Life of Mansfield," reviewing 
the celebrated criminal libel trials of this time, says : " For 
half a century longer, the maxim prevailed, ' The greater 



342 WIT AND HUMOR 

the truth, the greater the libel,' until the passage of Camp- 
bell's Libel Bill, 1843, permitting the truth to be given in 
evidence, and referring it to the jury to decide whether 
the defendant was actuated by malice or not." 

" The law compels no one to impossibilities" This is ex- 
tremely considerate on the part of the law; but if it does 
not compel a man to impossibilities, it sometimes drives 
him to attempt them. The law, however, occasionally 
acts upon the principle of two negatives making an af- 
firmative; thus treating two impossibilities as if they 
amounted to a possibility. As, when a man cannot pay 
a debt, law expenses are added, which he cannot pay 
either; but the latter being added to the former, it is 
presumed, perhaps, that the two negatives, or impossibil- 
ities, may constitute one affirmative or possibility, and 
the debtor is accordingly thrown into prison, if he fails 
to accomplish it. 

" Things of a higher nature determine things of a lower 
nature." Thus a written agreement determines one in 
words; although if the words are of a very high nature, 
they put an end to all kinds of agreement between the 
parties. 

" Turn about is fair play." A prominent judge of Mas- 
sachusetts, having taken a train in Boston to return to 
his home in Quincy, discovered, after the train started, 
that it did not stop at his station. Accordingly, as the 
cars were approaching Quincy, he pulled the bell cord 
and the train came to a stand. The conductor rushed 
into the car: 

" Who pulled that rope ? " 

" I did," replied the judge. 

"What for?" 

" Because I wanted to get off." 



BENCH AND BAR. 343 

The conductor thereupon made some remarks to the 
judge more forcible and less respectful than he was ac- 
customed to hear. The judge thereupon complained to 
the president of the road, who told him he would inquire 
into the matter. 

When next they met, the judge asked the president if 
he had reprimanded the conductor for his insolence. 

"I spoke to him," he replied. 

" Well, what did he say ? " 

" He said he would come some day and adjourn your 
court." 

The judge appreciated the man's way of saying that 
he had the right to control his own train, and did not 
pursue the matter further. 

" When I cannot talk sense, I talk metaphor." This was 
an expression of Curran's. Lord Ken yon must have been 
doing the same thing when he once addressed the bench : 
" Really, my lords, it strikes me that it would be a mon- 
strous thing to say that a party can now come in, in the 
very teeth of an act of Parliament, and actually turn us 
round, under color of hanging us upon the foot of a con- 
tract made behind our backs." 

Maynard, Sir John. — To the infamous Judge Jef- 
freys, who taunted him with having grown so old as to 
forget his law, Maynard replied : 

" I have forgotten more law than you ever knew; but 
allow me to say, I have not forgotten much." 

McCartney, William H. — General McCartney, of 
Pennsylvania, was a lawyer of fine ability, and a political 
speaker of the first magnitude. His humorous style ap- 
pears in his response to the toast, " The Speakers in the 
Campaign," delivered at a Philadelphia banquet tendered ' 



344: WIT AND HUMOR. 

Col. M. S. Quay, chairman of the Republican State Com- 
mittee, November 23, 1878: 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Club: I thank 
you for the privilege of participating in this expression of 
your appreciation of your distinguished guest. Some 
one — of a Keely Motor turn of mind — has declared that 
the true theory of politics is principles, not men. But you 
might as well say that the true theory of agriculture is 
land, not ploughs. Because you can't elect governors on 
principles alone — I refer particularly to governors from 
Luzerne county — without men to develop them, any more 
than potatoes dropped on the virgin hillsides can be made 
to pan out heavily in the fall of the year. And the cam- 
paign we have just concluded, more than any other I 
have ever known, called for a master mind to direct the 
development of true principles and the combating of the 
heresies of political lunatics. I confess, though, I had my 
doubts and my misgivings, when the chairman of the 
State Central Committee informed me that I was to in- 
struct the intelligent public as to the finances of the 
country. (Laughter.) Because, up to that time, as a 
financier, I had not been a positive success. I had always 
managed to live within hailing distance of the almshouse, 
and I had only succeeded in proving my financial supe- 
riority over an occasional tailor. (Laughter.) 

And the method your distinguished guest adopted with 
me proves his ability to manage crude materials. 

" Go to Rouseville," said he ; " open up on the Rouse- 
villians, and let us see how they stand it." (Great laugh- 
ter.) 

Now, I am opposed to betting on principle — unless 
I have three of a kind, — but I am willing to wager 
$100,000 in gold coin there is not a man in this room who 
ever heard of Rouseville prior to the nomination of 



BENCH AND BAR. 345 

Henry M. Hoyt. Why, I spent a week hunting for 
House ville, and I finally got as far west as Pittsburg, 
where Eussell Errett introduced me to a sheriff who had 
sold out Eouseville two years before. And he told me 
he did not realize enough on his writs to meet the costs. 
Eouseville is an aggregation of oil pumps — and if pumps 
could have voted, what a majority Eouseville would have 
rolled up for the sweet child of the circus, — and each one 
of these pumps has a separate and distinct creak; for, 
while they are pumping for oil — and the motions of 
these pumps are well calculated to disturb the nerves of 
a man given to strong drink — they don't raise enough 
•oil with which to grease their machinery. (Great laugh- 
ter.) 

The principal occupation of the Eousevillians is pulling 
each other out of holes in their sidewalks. (Applause 
and laughter.) Oh, it's a lively, cheerful town, Eouse- 
ville is. (Applause and laughter.) They postponed a 
funeral three days before I got there. They said they 
wanted to get up an entertainment for the speaker. 
(Eoars of laughter and applause.) They told me — the 
Eousevillians did — that I was to treat in my remarks 
the living issues of the day. And the living issue that 
agitated what the average Eouse villi an was pleased to 
call his mind, was a one-armed soldier who had been 
turned out of the postoffice for reaching too far with his 
remaining arm. (Great laughter.) I told them that the 
logical connection between the one-armed patriot and 
hard money was not visible to the naked eye of the 
casual observer, and I suggested they might average up 
things by cutting off an arm of the man who got into the 
one-armed patriot's place (laughter), a proposition the 
present incumbent did not seem to regard with favor. I 
then invited the entire Eepublican party of Eouseville 



346 WIT -AND HUMOR 

up to drink. It consisted of the postmaster and a man 
who wants to be sealer of weights and measures under 
Gen. Hoyt. I might remark in this connection there 
seem to be two classes of people in this state: those who 
want to be sealers of weights and measures and those who 
don't. The first class is rather the most numerous, and 
the second — well, the second is backing up the first. 
(Laughter and applause.) And then, following the ex- 
ample of my associates on the stump, I telegraphed to 
the papers that the speaker was an immense success. 

McKinley, William.— President McKinley 's deli- 
cate sense of humor reflects the kindness and generosity 
proverbial in his life. 

Loyalty to the government is our national creed. We 
follow, all of us, one flag. It symbolizes our purposes and 
our aspirations; it represents what we believe and what 
we mean to maintain, and, wherever it floats, it is the flag 
of the free, the hope of the oppressed, and, wherever it is 
assailed, at any sacrifice it will be carried to a triumphant 
peace. — Address at Cliff Haven, N. Y. 

One afternoon a young lawyer from New England 
called at the White House to pay his respects to President 
McKinley. The young man's father had known the Presi- 
dent in earlier years, and had, in some way, been of serv- 
ice to him. As soon as he heard the family relationship 
of the caller the President invited him to stay to luncheon, 
and during the meal asked his guest what he was doing 
in Washington. 

"Attending to some business in the Patent Office. I'm 
a patent lawyer." 

"Doing well?" 

" Fairly. But they're slow down at the Patent Office. 
It tries one's patience to get his business through." 



BENCH AND BAR. 347 

The President was silent a moment, and then he asked 
the young lawyer to take a drive with him that afternoon. 

" I don't see how I can," said the lawyer, " for it is ab- 
solutely necessary for me to be at the Patent Office a lit- 
tle after three o'clock." 

" Well, I'll drive you down there." . 

When the carriage came up they drove down to the 
Patent Office, and when they had reached the door of 
that great department building, the President paused to 
chat a moment, and warmly shook the young man's hand 
before driving away. The remainder of the story can 
best be told by the young lawyer himself: 

"You ought to have seen how easily things came for 
me that day. The officials couldn't do enough for me. 
They just broke their necks to serve me. Wherever I 
went every one seemed to know the President of the 
United States had driven me down there in his carriage. 
I really believe he did it on purpose." 

Just after McKinley's election to the Presidency, an 
aged man, one of the oldest friends of the McKinleys,. 
called at the Canton home. 

" Why, how do you do, Uncle John ? " cordially ex- 
claimed the President-elect to the farmer. 

The farmer's face flushed as he replied, "Neighbor,, 
'tain't all right to call you neighbor any more, and I 
want to know just how to speak to you. You used to be 
just Major McKinley, and then you was Lawyer McKin- 
ley, and then after a bit you was Congressman McKinley, 
and then you got to be Governor McKinley. Now you 
are elected President McKinley, but you ain't President 
yet." 

McKinley laughed heartily at the perplexity of his con- 
stituent and answered: 

" John, I won't have a friend of mine, such as you are,. 



348 WIT AND HUMOR. 

address me by any prouder title than that of Major. 
That rank belongs to me. I am not Governor any more, 
and I am not President yet. So you just call me plain 
Major, which I like to be to all my friends." 

Merritt, Thomas. — A group of well-known politi- 
cians were trying to solve the important question, who 
is the greatest lawyer in Illinois ? No harmonious decis- 
ion seemed possible until one of the disputants observed: 

" Here comes Tom Merritt ; he's the oracle — let's leave 
it to him. Tom, we want to know who is the greatest 
lawyer in Illinois ? " 

" D-o-d-do you leave it to me ? " stuttered Merritt, with 
becoming gravity. 

" Yes." 

" Want me to d-d-cide it ? " 

"That's it." 

" Wuh-wuh-well, then, I am." 

There was a chorus of derisive guffaws, and some one 
remarked : 

" You can't prove that, Tom." 

"D-d-don't need to prove it; I adm-m-mit it." 

Mirehouse, Sergeant. — Mr. Sergeant Kobinson says 
that Mirehouse got through his cases with extraordinary 
rapidity, yet was a man of strict integrity, determined to 
do justice to all. "I have known Mirehouse," he says, 
" more than once sentence a man to seven years' trans- 
portation at the end of as many minutes from the com- 
mencement of the trial" 

This was the common form with him. A prisoner 
might be indicted for stealing a purse from a woman in 
the street. 

The Common Sergeant to the prosecutrix, after getting 



BENCH AND BAR. 349 

her name and address : " Were you in such a street on 
such a day ? " 

" Yes, my lord." 

" Had. you a purse in your hand ?" 

" Yes, my lord." 

" Policeman, produce the purse. Is that your purse?" 

" Yes, my lord." 

" Did you see the prisoner ? " 

" Yes, my lord." 

"What did he do?" 

" He snatched the purse from me and ran away." 

Mirehouse to the prisoner: "Prisoner, do you wish to 
ask the witness anything?" 

"No, my lord." 

"Policeman, did you apprehend the prisoner?" 

" Yes, my lord, and found this purse upon him." 

" Did he say anything ? " 

" He said he picked it up in the street." 

" Prisoner, do you wish to say anything to the jury ? " 

" No, my lord, except that what I told the policeman 
is true." 

Mirehouse: "Well, gentlemen of the jury, if you be- 
lieve the evidence, you will say that the prisoner is guilty. 
He says he picked up the purse in the street. I have 
walked the streets of London for many years now, and 
I have never been lucky enough to pick up a purse. Per- 
haps some of you have. Consider your verdict." 

The verdict would be speedily given, and Mirehouse, 
without using a single superfluous word, would pass sen- 
tence and immediately proceed with the trial of another 
case. 

Montague, Hill. — At the first annual banquet of the 
Commercial Law League of America in Detroit in 1895, 



:350 WIT AND HUMOR 

Mr. Montague, of Richmond, Ya., responded eloquently 
to the toast, The Laioyer of the South: 

It was in the early dawn of this century that the South- 
ern lawyer became known as one of the strongest arms 
of our government. It was at the close of the last cen- 
tury, a little more than a hundred years ago, that a South- 
ern lawyer in old St. John's Church, Richmond, stood up 
and said in that tempestuous crowd, " Give me liberty or 
give me death." 1 am afraid some of you will echo that 
sentiment here before long. It was a Southern lawyer 
who penned the Bill of Rights, that wonderful instrument 
that guarantees to us freedom of conscience, of speech and 
of the press. It was a Southern lawyer who penned that 
remarkable document, the Declaration of Independence. 
It would take too long to run along this list, but we might 
mention the names of Patrick Henry, of Madison, of Mon- 
roe, and of Sargent S. Prentiss, men who have honored 
the Southern land, but no less honored our whole united 
Union. And what shall 1 say of the lawyers of to-clay ? 
In order to tell you of the lawyers of to-day I must needs 
take you back in your thoughts a little more than thirty 
years ago, when the strong tide of war burst over the South- 
land, and for four long years this country knew a civil 
strife unequaled in the annals of histor} 7 . But the South- 
ern lawyers went out into our battlefields, many of them 
spilt their life's blood there in defence of what they be- 
lieved to be right, but on that memorable day at Appomat- 
tox they yielded up the sword to the valorous Grant, the 
man who received it with so much magnanimity from our 
honored Lee. (Applause.) After they had silently stacked 
their arms they took down their musty books and started 
again the practice of law. And to-day we have men there 
who are honoring their profession. Men who, while they 
have the warm blood of the South, yet are more progress- 



BENCH AND BAR 351 

ive, more industrious, and more in keeping with the for- 
ward march of the times. We might mention to you the 
men of to-day, among them William L. Wilson, John W. 
Daniel, Speaker Crisp, Senator Morgan, and others equally 
great. But we must pass on. Among the distinguished 
law writers of the South of the present day, and of the 
days that are past and gone, your minds will recall 
readily Judah P. Benjamin, the man who has given us the 
foremost work on jurisprudence; and then John D. Miner, 
of my own state, who has furnished us with his " Insti- 
tutes;" and J. W. Daniel, whose "Negotiable Instru- 
ments " are accepted as authority in every state in this 
Union. And now let me say — I have only spoken seven 
minutes ; I always close on time — let me say that this is 
not the time nor the place to make long speeches at this 
late hour, but it has done my heart good to come here 
from the South and to tell you that out of the ashes of 
the Old South there has arisen a New South and loyal to 
the new Union, and to-day we can shake hands and march 
on to victory and to success, and woe be to the outsider 
who comes against us. (Applause.) Let me say, Mr. 
Toastmaster and ladies and gentlemen, in bidding you 
adieu, that I trust from the bottom of my heart that each 
lawyer here present may so practice his profession through 
honesty, integrity and industry as to be able to chisel out 
of the rough-hewn rocks of life a valuable and successful 
career. (Applause.) 

Morris, Lord.— The brogue of the south and west of 
Ireland is softer and more musical than the brogue of the 
north, which has about it some of the flavor of the Scot- 
tish accent. When Lord Morris was Chief Justice of Ire- 
land, a young junior barrister rose in his court one day 
to make his motion, and spoke in the hard brogue of the 
north of Ireland. 



352 WIT AND HUMOR 

" Sapel," said the judge in a low voice to the registrar 
of the court, "who is this newcomer?" 

" His name is Clements, my lord." 

" What part of the coonthry does he hail from, in the 
name of all that's wundherful ? " asked the judge. 

"County Antrim, my lord." 

" Well, well," said the judge, " did you iver come across 
sich a froightful accint in the whole coorse av yer born 
loife?" 

Mortgage. — A Swede came into a lawyer's office and 
asked : 

"Is hare ben a lawyer's place?" 

" Yes, I am a lawyer." 

" Well, Maister Lawyer, I tank I skall have a paper 
made." 

" What kind of a paper do you want ? " 

" Well, I tank I skall have a mortgage. You see, I buy 
me a piece of land from Nels Petersen, and I want a 
mortgage on it ? " 

" Oh, no. You don't want a mortgage ; what you want 
is a deed." 

"No, maister; I tank I want mortgage. You see, I 
buy me two pieces of land before, and I got deed for 
dem, and 'nother faller come along with mortgage and 
take the land ; so I tank I better get mortgage this time." 

Motions. — The following scene in an English court is 
reported : 

" Divisional Court.— Coram Kelly (L. C. B.) and Mel- 
lor (J.). Eleven A. M. — At the conclusion of the ex parte 
motions. 

Mr. A. : Might I mention to your lordship a case of 
Snooks v. Jones, which stands fifth on your lordship's 



BENCH AND BAR 353 

list ? (The learned gentleman was here interrupted by 
another learned counsel, who made some communication 
to him..) I beg your lordship's pardon ; I find that it is 
now useless to apply to your lordship. (Prepares to sit 
down.) 

The L. C. B. : What is the name of your case, Mr. A.? 

Mr. A. : My lord, the case is that of Snooks v. Jones, 
but— 

Mr. J. Mellor : Snooks against what? 

Mr. A. : Jones, my lord. 

The L. C. B.: How do you spell it? 

Mr. A. : J-o-n-e-s, my lord. But as I said before — 

The L. C. B. : One moment, pray. (Writes down the 
name.) Now, will you have the goodness to tell us what 
the case is — what question is raised for the decision of 
this court, and in what form ? 

Mr. A.: My lord, I was just about to tell your lord- 
ship — 

The L. C. B. (with some warmth): Never mind what 
you were about to tell me, sir. If learned counsel would 
not constantly attempt to evade the questions of the 
court, the business of the court would be transacted in a 
much more rapid and satisfactory manner, and there 
would be a great saving of the public time. 

Mr. A.: My lord, I was not attempting to evade your 
lordship's questions; but, with the object of saving pub- 
lic time, I ventured to think — 

The L. C. B.: I must trouble you not to venture to 
think anything until you have told us the facts. When 
the court is in possession of all the facts, it will then, and 
not till then, be in a position to listen to any application 
which you may wish to make. In the meantime, I must 
ask you to have the goodness to raise your voice. 
23 



354 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Mr. A. (in stentorian tones) : I do not wish to make 
any applica — 

The L. C. B.: You have not informed us for whom 
you appear. 

Mr. A. : For the plaintiff. But if your lordship will 
bear with me one — 

The L. C. B. : Stop, pray; for the plaintiff, you say. 
Does any one appear for the defendant ? 

Mr. A. : My learned friend, Mr. B. 

Mr. B. : I appear for the defendant, my lord. I per- 
haps may be allowed to tell your lordship — 

The L. 0. B. : One at a time, please. Mr. A. is at pres- 
ent in possession of the court; and I desire, in the first 
instance, to hear from him, if he will have the goodness 
to tell me, which he seems strangely reluctant to do, the 
facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. 

(Mr. J. Mellor here left the court ; and the facts, which 
which were of an uninteresting and complicated nature, 
were gone into. Owing to the defective acoustic prop- 
erties of the building, frequent repetition was necessary, 
and an hour and a half were thus consumed. Mr. J. 
Mellor returned.) 

The L. C. B. : Yery well, you have explained the facts 
lucidly and clearly, and we shall now be most happy to 
hear the nature of your application. 

Mr. A.: My lord, I have no application to make. 
(Laughter.) 

The L. 0. B. : I must really beg — nay, if necessary, I 
must insist — that there be no unseeming interruption 
to the business of this court. (To Mr. A.) You say you 
have no application to make. Will you have the good- 
ness to tell us, then, why you are taking up the time of 
the court ? 

Mr. A. : My lord, I was about to ask your lordship to 



BENCH AND BAR. 355 

allow this case to stand over until to-morrow, with the 
consent, as I was informed, of my learned friend on the 
other side. As I was about to apply to your lordship, I 
was told by my learned friend, who entered the court at 
that moment, that he had given no such consent; and I 
therefore desire to withdraw my application. 

The L. C. B. (after consultation with the officers of the 
court): Of course, without the consent of the other side, 
we can make no such order. The case will retain its 
place on the list. 

The court then adjourned for luncheon. 

The late Judge Blackman, of Michigan, was very strict 
in requiring counsel to observe the rules of practice. In 
a cause in which Attorney T. had issued a capias, Attor- 
ney L. moved to quash the writ, and, proceeding with his 
argument, was interrupted by the judge: 

" What are you reading from ? " 

" From a work on logic, your honor." 

" Did you give Brother T. notice that you were going 
to read from a work on logic ? " 

" Of course not, your honor." 

" Are you aware, sir, of the rule of court requiring no- 
tice to be given of matter likely to surprise the attorney 
on the other side ? " 

" Yes, your honor; but the rule has no application to a 
matter of this kind." 

"I don't know, sir; I don't know. I know of nothing 
that would surprise Brother T. more than logic, and if 
you haven't given him notice that you were going to read 
from a work of that kind, I can't permit you to read it." 

Lawyer L., proceeding with his argument, was again 
interrupted by the court: 

" What are you reading from now, sir ? " 

" Green's grammar, your honor." 



356 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" Did you give Brother T. notice that you were going 
to read from Green's grammar ? " 

" Certainly not, your honor." 

" Well, sir, I know of nothing in this world, aside from 
logic, that would surprise Brother T. more than grammar; 
and if you haven't given him notice of your intention to 
read from Green's grammar, I can't permit you to read 
it, and I shall deny your motion with costs." 

Allen C. Spooner, a brilliant member of the Massachu- 
setts bar, once moved to postpone the trial of a case. The 
judge refused the application, saying: 

" I suppose you are aware, Mr. Spooner, that this court 
sits for the dispatch of business." 

"I beg your honor's pardon; I thought it sat for the 
administration of justice." 

On a motion before O'Conner, J., counsel opened the 
matter at great length. His lordship expressed a diffi- 
culty in understanding what was being moved for. 

Counsel : " It is what they call in chancery < speaking 
to the minutes.' " 

His Lordship : " Hours, you mean." 

A young man, having lost a cause in the criminal court, 
moved for a rule to show cause why a new trial should 
not be granted. The judge glanced hastily over the rea- 
sons, and, throwing them down, told counsel there was 
nothing in them, and that he wouldn't grant the rule. 
An older member of the bar privately remonstrated with 
the judge, and observed to him that the young man ap- 
peared to be mortified, and that it would, perhaps, have 
been better to have allowed the rule, and heard the argu- 
ment, even if finally the new trial should not be granted. 

" But," replied his honor, " the reasons amounted to 
nothing." 



BENCH AND BAR. 357 

" Suppose it were so," rejoined the counsel, " motions 
of this sort often amount to nothing, as you yourself 
know. You were an eminent lawyer before you were 
placed upon the bench; yet, in the case of Early, in which 
your client was convicted of murder, one of the reasons 
assigned hy you for a new trial was that, in arguing the 
case of the defendant, you had put some of the jury to 
sleep ; yet the court entertained your motion, and I defy 
any man to suggest a poorer reason than that." 

The judge laughed — admitted the truth of the state- 
ment — and reformed his practice. 

The jury having returned a verdict of "guilty " against 
a man for stealing sheep, his counsel said : 

" If your honor please, I move to quash the proceedings 
on the ground of a defective information. While my 
client admits stealing twelve lambs, he has been charged 
with and convicted of stealing twelve sheep. A lamb is 
not legally a sheep, your honor." 

" Your point is well taken," replied the judge, after re- 
flection, "and I will give the prisoner the benefit of the 
technicality. I was intending to sentence him to the 
penitentiary for two years, but will change it to state 
prison for the same term. While a lamb is not a sheep, 
neither is a state prison a penitentiary." 

The late Judge Townsend, of California, an able lawyer, 
but slow in argument, appeared before Judge Wheeler 
one motion day, and, the motion calendar being called, 
ten were answered ready. Usually, ten " ready " motions 
can be disposed of in one or two hours. But Townsend 
had the first motion, and another " slow-coach " was the 
opposing counsel. Some of the attorneys who had other 
motions began to leave the chamber. 

"Are you ready, Judge Townsend ? " Wheeler inquired. 



358 WIT AND HUMOR. 

"Yes, your honor," said Townsend slowly. 
" No other motion will be taken up to-day," said 
Wheeler. 

Naturalization. — Some very amusing scenes occur in 
the naturalization courts : 

Judge: " Do you know O'Brien ? " 

Irish witness: " Yes, sir." 

"How long has he been in this country ?" 

"A little over five years." 

" Is he a man of good moral character ?" 

" Sure, your honor, I don't know what moral character 
manes." 

" Well, sir, does O'Brien stand fair before the commu- 
nity?" 

" By my sowl, I don't apprehend your maning, your 
honor." 

"I' mean to ask you, sir, if O'Brien, the person who 
wants to be a citizen, and for whom you are a witness, is 
a good man, or not ? " 

" To be sure he is. Sure and I've seen him in ten fights 
during the last two years, and every time he licked his 



A gem from the " ould sod " appeared before Judge 
Grey, of Elmira, New York. 

" How long, Mr. O 'Toole, have you been in this coun- 
try?" 

" Six years, y'r honor." 

" Where did you land ? " 

"In New York, sir." 

" Have you ever been out of the United States since 
you landed six years ago ? " 

" Niver but once, y'r honor ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 359 

u And where did you go then ? " 
" To Elmira, y'r honor." 

The judge joined heartily in the explosion that fol- 
lowed, but he gave the Irishman his papers. 

Michael Muldoon was a tall, slim Irishman, with eyes 
full of humor and manners of the strictly private, confi- 
dential kind. In his interviews he desired to be in such 
close communion with you that the words he used would 
fall sooner upon your lips than ears. 'Twas a way he 
had, but it was an objectionable way. He came into the 
Court of Common Pleas one morning with a cloud of 
other men as a witness for his friend, Thomas O'Flaherty, 
who desired to become a citizen of the United States. 
He answered the questions put to him by the judge, and 
ever and anon, in endeavoring to get closer and closer to 
his interrogator, leaned over the rail which kept him from 
the sacred precincts of the bench, until he ceased to be 
perpendicular. At length he was asked : 

" Is Thomas O'Flaherty a man of good moral charac- 
ter?" 

Drawing himself to his full height, stepping back from 
the rail and looking astonished and indignant, he re- 
sponded : 

" Do you mane to axe me if me frind Tom is a man of 
good karacther ? " 

" I do," said the judge. 

" Well, then, av ye do (and it's jokin' I think ye are) 
I'll tell ye all about it. He plays on the fiddle. He rades 
the Boible. He doesn't whip the ould woman. Art he 
takes a dhrqp of whiskey now and then. Will that plaze 

ye?" 

The success of this defence of his friend was satisfac- 
tory and another defender of the Union walked gallantly 
away. 



360 WIT AND HUMOR. 

The place was Boston, and the court room crowded with 
applicants for citizenship. 

" Where does the President reside? " the judge asked an 
Italian. 

" In Washington street." 

" You may stand aside." 

The Italian went away to brush up his history, and the 
judge said to a French-Canadian from Fall River: 

" Who is the President of the United States ? " 

"McKinley." 

" If he should die, who would succeed him ? " 

" His son." 

This man also went away sorrowful. 

So did the man who said the President lived " on Fleet 
street," and another who declared the President's name 
was "Byron;" and still another who asserted that the 
President was likewise governor of Massachusetts and 
mayor of Boston. 

Nisbet, E. A. — Judge Nisbet, one of the truly great ju- 
rists in the early history of the Supreme Court of Georgia, 
was "a perspicuous and polished expositor of the law, in 
its principles and precedents ; " but, as Walter B. Hill, 
Esq., says of him, in his interesting sketch of the Supreme 
Court of that state: 

His mental organism had one singular defect: on the 
subject of spelling his mind was a howling wilderness. 
He could not spell nor learn to spell the commonest 
words. His method of orthography resembled a cj T clone 
in chaos — a law unto itself. I have seen a letter from 
him in which he spelled "secession" three ways; he 
drafted the ordinance of secession for Georgia, but never 
learned to write that historical word. He humorously 
confessed his phonetic but revolutionary methods with 



BENCH AND BAR. 361 

the alphabet, and cheerfully submitted to the reporter's 
revision of his decisions. 

An anecdote he loved to tell is in order. He con- 
cluded a decision with the maxim, Id certum est quod 
reddi certum potest. The decision was adverse to the 
side represented by a strong-minded but utterly illiter- 
ate practitioner, who sometimes tarried at the wine-cup 
with the usual consequences to his eyes. He said in pro- 
test: 

"Judge, I think it was bad enough to lose my case; 
I never expected to be called a red-eyed possum." 

Norbury, Lord.— Norbury— " the hanging judge "— 
was noted for his wit and his severity. 

In spite of its grimness, the humor of the following is 
evident. When acting in an official capacity, Norbury 
inquired of a man, capitally convicted, if he knew any 
reason why sentence of death should not be passed. The 
prisoner replied that he considered the joke had gone far 
enough and preferred to let the subject drop. 

" The subject may drop," said his lordship. 

A gentleman having boasted in his presence of having 
shot seventy hares before breakfast, Norbury observed 
very dryly: 

" You must have fired at a wig." 

Norbury and Counselor Parsons were passing by the 
Naas jail in the judge's carriage, when Norbury, notic- 
ing a vacant gibbet, observed: 

" Parsons, where would you be if that gallows had its 
due?" 

Parsons responded, " Kiding alone." 



362 WIT AND HUMOR. 

It was said of Norbury that he would rather lose a 
friend than a joke. On one Occasion he began sentence 
of death in this wise : 

" Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty by 
a jury of your own countrymen of the crime laid to 
your charge ; and I must say I entirely agree with the 
verdict; for I see 'scoundrel' written in your face." 

" That's a strong reflection — from your lordship ! " said 
the prisoner. 

The judge, keenly appreciating the joke, commuted the 
sentence to transportation for seven years. 

Norbury, while sitting as a special commissioner to try 
the culprits in one of the Irish rebellions, convicted a 
great many in a single day. 

" You are going on swimmingly, my lord," said one of 
the counsel for the prisoners. 

" Yes," — significantly — " seven knots an hour." 

Norbury was more noted for giving invitations than 
for hospitality. His invitations were always to his country 
seat, Cabra, — his town residence being too easy of ac- 
cess. On one occasion an old couple were simple enough 
to believe that the " When will you spend a week with 
me at Cabra ? " really meant what it expressed ; and, pack- 
ing up the requisites for a visit, they presented themselves 
at " the country house." Norbury received them with 
the blandest smiles, and in his presence of mind did not 
quail as the lady's-maid, the band-boxes, the heavy trunk, 
and other indications of a protracted sojourn made their 
appearance. Radiant with delight, he exclaimed : 

" My kind friends, my dear old friends, this is so very 
like you ! Now, no excuses — not a word — not a word I 
I must positively insist on your staying to dinner." 



BENCH AND BAR. 36a 

At a dinner, Counselor Parsons sat opposite some salted 
beef. 

" Is that hung beef, Mr. Parsons ? " inquired Norbury. 

"JSTot yet, my lord," was the caustic reply, " you have 
not tried it." 

On one occasion Norbury observed an attorney of doubt- 
ful reputation touting in the dock for business, and deter- 
mined to make an example of him. Just as the attorney 
was climbing over the rails of the dock into the court, his 
lordship called out: 

"Jailer, one of your prisoners is escaping. Put him back." 

Back the attorney was thrust, and the following col- 
loquy ensued: 

" My lord, there is a mistake here. I am an attorney." 

" I am very sorry, indeed," said Norbury, " to see one 
of your profession in the dock." 

" But, my lord, I am innocent." 

" Yes, they all say that," was the judge's reply. " A 
jury of your own fellow countrymen must settle it." 

"But, my lord," exclaimed the now desperate man, 
" there is no indictment against me." 

" Then," said his lordship, " you will be put back, and 
if no one appears to prosecute, you will be discharged by 
public proclamation at the end of the assizes." 

When Daniel O'Connell said, during a trial, that he 
feared the chief justice did not apprehend him, Norbury 
replied by alluding to the report that the agitator had 
surrendered himself to avoid fighting a duel: "Eo one is 
more easily apprehended than Mr. O'Connell — whenever 
he wishes to be apprehended." 

Sir Jonah Barrington says of the judge, in his " Eecol- 
lections," " Lord Nor bury had a hand for everybody, and 
a heart for nobody." 



364 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Barrister Grady scored a good hit on Norbury: 

" I am reminded, my lord, of a judge I once heard of 

who never wept but once, and that was at the theatre." 
"Some high tragedy, I suppose, Mr. Grady?" 
" Not at all, my lord ; it was at the Beggar's Opera, 

when they reprieved Macheath." 

When asked to contribute a shilling to bury a poor at- 
torney, Norbury replied : " Only a shilling to bury an 
attorney? Here's a guinea; go and bury one and twenty 
of them." 

Norbury had his joke to the very last. His neighbor, 
Lord Erne, was far advanced in years and bedridden. 
When his own health failed, he heard of his friend's in- 
creased illness. 

"James," said he to his servant, "go next door and tell 
Lord Erne, with my compliments, that it will be a dead- 
heat between us." 

North, Lord.— Lord North often slept during the 
speeches of his Parliamentary opponents, leaving a col- 
league to make note of anything remarkable. A tedious 
speaker during a naval debate began describing the 
growth of ship-building from the time of Noah's ark on- 
ward. When he had reached the time of the Spanish 
Armada, North was awakened inadvertently by his col- 
league, and inquired at what period the speaker had got to. 

" We are now in the reign of Queen Elizabeth," was 
the answer. 

" Dear, dear," said the Premier, " why not let me sleep 
a century or two more ? " 

North had a strong antipathy to classical music, and 
refused to subscribe to a certain series of concerts. " But 
your brother, the Bishop of Winchester, has subscribed." 



BENCH AND BAR 365 

"Yes," said his lordship, "if I were as deaf as my 
brother I would subscribe too." 

" When the Dutch say c We maritime powers,' it re- 
minds one," said North, " of the cobbler who lived next 
door to the lord mayor, and used to say * My neighbor 
and L' " 

Nye, James W. — One of the stories illustrative of 
the ready wit of the late Senator Nye is that he was 
once engaged in a case before a peevish judge in South- 
ern Nevada, and had examined a witness at great length. 
At last the patience of the judge was exhausted, and, re- 
buking Nye for his course, he petulantly asked : 

" General Nye, what do you think I am sitting here 
for?" 

Nye answered coolly: 

" You have me this time, your honor." 

Nye was once defending a prisoner who had confessed 
his crime, and against whom the evidence was over- 
whelming. As there were no extenuating circumstances, 
Nye hardly knew how to commence his plea. Finally, 
fertile of resources, he made the following appeal to the 
jury, and secured an acquittal: 

" Gentlemen of the jury," he began very solemnly, 
"you will not send this man to the scaffold, for death is 
the end of all earthly regrets and perhaps the first of 
eternal pardon. You will not condemn him to prison 
for life to enjoy the proud satisfaction of expiating his 
sin. No! punish him as he deserves by restoring him to 
liberty and a future laden with opprobrium and embit- 
tered by remorse. Hang him, and it is but a moment's 
pang. Set him free, and a guilty conscience will follow 
him to his grave! " 



366 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Oath. — A judge asked an " Ole Yirginny " witness 
" Do you know what an oath is ? " 
"Yes, sah; when a man swears to a lie he's got to 
stick to it." 

A negro giving evidence in a Georgia court was re- 
minded by the judge that he was to tell the whole 
truth. 

" Well, yer see, boss, I'se skeerd to tell de whole truf 
for feer I might tell a lie." 

Judge (to witness) : " Do you know the nature of an 
oath?" 
"Sah?" 

" Do you understand what you are to swear to ? " 
" Yes, sah ; I am to swar to tell de truf." 
"And what will happen if you do not tell it?" 
" I expects our side'll win de case, sah." 

When dealing with children, either in the witness box 
or in the dock, Sir Henry Hawkins always displayed a 
kindly disposition. He was once testing whether a boy 
witness understood the nature of an oath. In the course 
of his questions he said to the lad: 

"If I were to say that you had an orange in your 
mouth, would that be the truth ? " 

" No, it would be a lie." 

" And if I said you had one in your hand ? " 

"That would be another lie." 

" And if I promised you a bag of oranges and didn't 
give them to you, what would that be ? " 

" That would be a lie." 

"And if I did give them to you?" 

"That would be the truth." 

u Yery well; I will," and he did. 



BENCH AND BAR. 367 

O'Connell, Daniel.—- O'Connell, the distinguished 
patriot and orator, was admitted to the bar in 1798, at- 
taining fine success as a brilliant pleader. By his fervent 
advocacy of Catholic emancipation he is popularly known 
as the Great Agitator. To an unrivaled ability, wit, 
courage and marvelous eloquence, he united a rare knowl- 
edge of the Irish character. Wendell Phillips says of 
him: "Broadly considered, his eloquence has never been 
equaled in modern times, certainly not in English speech. 
Do you think I am partial ? John Kandolph, the Vir- 
ginia slave-holder, who hated an Irishman almost as much 
as he hated a Yankee, himself an orator of no mean level, 
on hearing O'Connell, exclaimed, ' This is the man, these 
are the lips, the most eloquent that speak English in my 
day. 5 I remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace 
of Everett, the rhetoric of Choate ; I know the eloquence 
that lay hid in the iron logic of Calhoun ; I have melted 
beneath the magnetism of Sergeant S. Prentiss, of Mis- 
sissippi, who wielded a power few men ever had. It has 
been my fortune to sit at the feet of the great speakers 
of the English tongue on the other side of the ocean. 
But I think all of them together never surpassed, and no 
one of them ever equaled, O'Connell. Nature intended 
him for our Demosthenes. Never since the great Greek 
has she sent forth any one so lavishly gifted for his work 
as a tribune of the people : he had a magnificent presence, 
impressive in bearing, massive like that of Jupiter." 

" When I was in Naples," says Phillips, " I asked Sir 
Thomas Buxton, a Tory, ' Is O'Connell an honest man ? ' 
' As honest a man as ever breathed,' was the reply ; and 
then he related this story : 

" When O'Connell entered Parliament in 1830, the Anti- 
Slavery cause was so weak that it had only Lushington 
and myself to speak for it; and we agreed that when he 



368 WIT AND HUMOR. 

spoke I would cheer him, and when I spoke he would 
cheer me; and these were the only cheers we ever got. 
O'Connell came, with one Irish member to support him. 
A large number of members (I think Buxton said twenty- 
seven), whom we called the West-India interest, the Bris- 
tol party, the slave party, went to him, saying, * O'Con- 
nell, at last you are in the House, with one helper. If 
3^ou will never go down to Freemasons' Hall with Buxton 
and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on 
every Irish question. If you work with those Abolition- 
ists, count us always against you.' 

"It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called 
statesman would have yielded! O'Connell said: 'Gen- 
tlemen, God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun 
sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my 
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if, to save Ire- 
land — even Ireland — I forget the negro one single 
hour!' 'From that day,' said Buxton, 'Lushington and 
I never went into the lobby that O'Connell did not fol- 
low us.' 

" The foremost Catholic of his age, the most stalwart 
champion of the church, he was also broadly and sin- 
cerely tolerant of every faith. His toleration had no 
limit and no qualification." 

In 1843, when the Munster meetings were proceeding, 
the Peel ministry sent shorthand writers to report the 
speeches of O'Connell. On one occasion, seeing the gen- 
tlemen of the press assembled on the platform, ready to 
record every word he uttered, O'Connell called out to 
know whether they' had every facility and accommoda- 
tion necessary. They answered, truly, that everything 
had been done for their ease and comfort. It was in one 
of the southern counties, where the Irish language is 
spoken as often as the English, and O'Connell, glancing 



BENCH AND BAR. 36£ 

waggishly around, commenced a speech in Irish, to the 
surprise and dismay of the English reporters. The audi- 
ence instantly caught the humor of the joke and shouts 
of laughter followed. It was a great triumph thus to 
have baffled the government through its reporters, and 
was one of the amusing episodes of a period of great per- 
sonal and political excitement. 

A story is told of a victory achieved over O'Connell by 
a witness whom he was cross-examining. It was after 
he had won his celebrated sobriquet of " the big beggar- 
mm." The witness was for the crown, in a case of riot 
committed by a mob of beggars, and he represented the 
affair as very serious. 

" Now, just tell the court how many there were," said 
O'Connell. 

"Indeed, I never stopped to count them, your honors 
but there was a whole tribe of them ! " 

" A whole tribe of them ! Will ye tell us to what tribe 
they belonged ? " 

" Indeed, your honor, that's more than I can do at all,, 
for sure I never heard ; but I think it must have been to 
the tribe of Dan ! " 

" You may go down, sir ! " cried O'Connell in a rage,, 
amidst the irrepressible laughter of the court. 

O'Connell was defending a prisoner indicted for mur- 
der. The principal witness swore strongly against the 
prisoner — one corroborative circumstance being the pris- 
oner's hat found near the spot where the murder took 
place. The witness swore positively the hat produced 
was the one found, and that it belonged to the prisoner, 
whose name was James. 

" By virtue of your oath, are you positive that this is 
the same hat ? " 
24 



370 WIT AND HUMOR. 

"Yes." 

"Did you examine it carefully before you swore in 
your information that it was the prisoner's ? " 

"Yes." 

"Now, let me see," said O'Connell, — and he took up 
the hat, and began carefully to examine the inside. He 
then spelt aloud, slowly: "J-a-m-e-s." Now, do you mean 
to say that name was in the hat when you found it ? " 

"I do." 

" Did you see it there ? " 

"I did." 

" And this is the same hat ? " 

"Yes." 

" JSTow, my lord," said O'Connell, holding up the hat to 
the bench, " there's an end to this case — there is no name 
whatever inscribed in the hat." 

The result was instant acquittal. 

O'Connell's story of doing a judge out of a bribe is in- 
teresting : 

" Dennis O'Brien had a record at Nenagh. The judge 
talked of purchasing a pair of carriage horses, and Den- 
nis accordingly sent him a magnificent pair, hoping they 
would answer his lordship. The judge graciously ac- 
cepted the horses, and praised their points extravagantly, 
and, what was more important for Dennis, he charged 
the jury in his favor, and obtained a verdict for him. 
The instant Dennis gained his point he sent in a bill to the 
judge for the full value of the horses. His lordship called 
Dennis aside to expostulate privately with him : 

" ' Oh, Mr. O'Brien,' said he, ' I did not think you meant 
to charge me for those horses. Come, now, my dear 
friend, why should I pay you for them ? ' 

" ' Upon my word, that's curious talk,' retorted Dennis, 
in a tone of defiance; 'I'd like to know why your lord- 
ship should not pay me for them ? ' 



BENCH AND BAR. 371 

" To this inquiry, of course, a reply was impossible ; all 
the judge had for it was to hold his peace and pay the 
money." 

He was applied to by a friend for his autograph ; to 
which he replied: 

" Si/Ty I never send autographs. 

"Yours, Daniel O'Connell." 

Thomas Massey, a Parliamentary member who had his 
eye always on the Pope, brought in a bill to obliterate 
the Popish affix "mas" or "mass," and substitute the 
good old Saxon word " tide " in all instances as Christ- 
mas and Michaelmas, so that they should read "Christ- 
tide " and " Michael-tide," respectively. O'Connell list- 
ened attentively to all the member had to say in favor 
of his scheme, and then got up and said: "Since the 
honorable gentleman is so anxious to wipe out the ob- 
noxious 'mas' from the English vocabulary, why does 
he not make a commencement by Saxonizing his own 
name? In that case he would be known as Thotide 
Tidey." The bill was fairly laughed out of the House. 

How to forgive the man you have injured has an amus- 
ing illustration: Charles Phillips, when commencing his 
career at the Irish bar, received much attention from 
O'Connell. Later, in an accidental discussion in Parlia- 
ment, in which Phillips's authority as an Irishman was 
used in opposition to the views of O'Connell, the latter 
indulged in a diatribe against Phillips, which entirely 
estranged him from the idol of the Green Isle. Months 
passed without any communication or recognition be- 
tween them. But one day at the club, up came O'Con- 
nell to Phillips, exclaiming: 

" I'm tired of not speaking to you, Charles. Shake 
hands; I forgive you, Charles." 



372 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Phillips did not venture to say what was at the tip of 
his tongue — that it was the first instance of an aggressor 
forgiving the man he had injured. The two were recon- 
ciled and as affectionate as ever. 

Alluding to the loose construction of Parliamentary 
enactments, O'Connell said : 

" I can drive a coach-and-six through any act of Par- 
liament." 

Once when O'Connell was rudely interrupted during 
the debate on the Irish Registration Bill, he used the ex- 
pression " beastly bellowings." " Then arose," says Ma- 
caulay, in his journal, June 11, 1840, "such an uproar as 
no O. P. mob at Covent Garden, no crowd of Chartists 
in front of the hustings, ever equaled. A short and most 
amusing scene passed between O'Connell and Lord Maid- 
stone, who was so ill-mannered that I hope he was drunk. 
" If," said Maidstone, " the word ' beastly ' is retracted, I 
shall be satisfied. If not, I shall not be satisfied." — 'I 
do not care whether the noble lord be satisfied or not.' — 
' I wish you would give me satisfaction.' — ' I advise the 
noble lord to carry his liquor meekly.' " 

O'Connell, in one of his speeches in Conciliation Hall, 
told his followers that if measures injurious to Ireland 
were brought to Parliament he would go over to England, 
and "die on the floor of the House of Commons in oppo- 
sition to them ; " and when he came back he would say, 
" Are you for Repeal now ? " 

O'Connell related the following pathetic story of Mr. 
Tim Driscoll, for many years a leading member of the 
Munster circuit: 

" I remember," he said, "an occasion when Tim behaved 
nobly. His brother, a blacksmith, was to be tried for his 



BENCH AND BAR. 373 

life for the part he had taken in the rebellion of 179S; 
and Tim's friends among the barristers predicted that 
Tim would shirk his brother and contrive to be engaged 
in the other court when the trial should come on, in order 
to avoid the public recognition of so humble a connection 
as the blacksmith. Bets were offered upon the course 
Tim would take. He nobly disappointed the predictions 
of his enemies. He waited till his brother was brought 
into the dock — sprang into the dock and embraced him — 
remained at his side during the whole trial, cross-examined 
the witnesses for the prosecution from the dock, invari- 
ably styling the prisoner 'my brother.' He carried the 
sympathies of the jury entirely with him, got a verdict 
for his brother, and earned glory for himself." 

When O'Connell was yet a very young man his talent 
for vituperative language was so great that he was deemed 
matchless as a scold. There lived in Dublin Biddy Mori- 
arty, who kept a huckster's stall on one of the quays 
nearly opposite the Four Courts. She was a first-class 
virago, — formidable with fist and tongue, — so that her 
voluble imputation had become proverbial in the country 
round about. 

Some of O'Connell's friends thought that he could de- 
feat her with her own weapons, while others ridiculed 
the idea. The Kerry barrister could not stand this, so 
he backed himself for a match. Bets were offered and 
taken, and it was decided that the matter should be set- 
tled at once. So, proceeding to the huckster's stall with 
a few friends, O'Connell commenced his attack on the 
old lady: 

" What is the price of this walking-stick, Mrs. What's- 
your-name?" 

" Moriarty, sir, is my name, and a good one it is ; and 



374 WIT AND HUMOR. 

what have you to say agin it ? and one and sixpence's 
the price of the stick. Troth, it's cheap as dirt, so it is." 

" One and sixpence for a walking-stick ! whew ! Why, 
you are no better than an impostor to ask eighteenpence 
for what cost you twopence." 

" Twopence your grandmother ! Do you mane to say 
that it's chating the people I am ? Impostor, indeed ! " 

"Ay, impostor; and it's that 1 call you to your teeth." 

" Come, cut your stick, you cantankerous jackanapes." 

" Keep a civil tongue in your head, you old diagonal," 
cried O'Connell, calmly. 

" Stop your jaw, you pug-nosed badger, or by this and 
that," cried Mrs. Moriarty, " I'll make you go quicker nor 
you came." 

" Don't be in a passion, my old radius ; anger will only 
wrinkle your beauty." 

"By the hokey, if you say another word of impudence, 
I'll tan your hide, you bastely common scrub; and sorry 
I'll be to soil nrv fists upon your carcass." 

"Easy now, — easy now," cried O'Connell, with imper- 
turbable good humor; "don't choke yourself with fine 
language, you old whiskey-drinking parallelogram." 

" What's that you call me, you murderin' villain ? " 
roared Mrs. Moriarty, stung into fury. 

"I call you," answered O'Connell, "a parallelogram; 
and a Dublin judge and jury will say it's no libel to call 
you so." 

"Oh, tare-an-ouns ! Oh, holy Biddy! that an honest 
woman like me should be called a parry bellygrum to her 
face ! I'm none of your parrybellygrums, you rascally 
gallows-bird, you cowardly, sneaking, plate-lickin' blig- 
gard ! " 

" Oh, not you, indeed ! " retorted O'Connell. " Why, 
I suppose you'll deny that you keep a hypothenuse in 
your house." 



BENCH AND BAR. 375 

" It's a lie for you, you beastly robber ! I never had 
such a thing in my house, you swindling thief ! " 

" Why, sure all of your neighbors know very well that 
you keep not only a hypothenuse, but that you have two 
diameters locked up in }^our garret, and that you go out 
to walk with them every Sunday, you heartless old hep- 
tagon." 

" Oh, hear that, ye saints in glory ! Oh, there's bad 
language from a fellow that wants to pass for a jintle- 
man! May the divil fly away with you, you mealy- 
mouthed bag of wind ! " 

"Ah, you can't deny the charge, you miserable sub- 
multiple of a duplicate ratio." 

" You saucy tinker's apprentice, if you don't cease your 
jaw, I'll — " But here she gasped for breath, unable to 
hawk up any more words, for the last volley of O'Connell 
had nearly knocked the wind out of her. 

" While I have a tongue I'll abuse you, you most inim- 
itable periphery. Look at her, boys! there she stands, — 
a convicted perpendicular in petticoats. There's contam- 
ination in her circumference, and she trembles with guilt 
down to the extremities of her corollaries. Ah ! you're 
found out, you rectilinear-antecedent and equiangular old 
hag! 'Tis with you the devil will fly away, you porter- 
swiping similitude of the bisection of a vortex ! " 

Overwhelmed with this torrent of language, Mrs. Mo- 
riarty was silenced. Catching up a saucepan, she was 
aiming at O'Connell's head when he very prudently made 
a timely retreat. 

"You have won the wager, O'Connell; here's your 
bet," cried the gentleman who had proposed the contest. 

After O'Connell had obtained the acquittal of a horse- 
stealer, the thief in the ecstacy of his gratitude cried out : 
" Och, counselor ! I've no way here to thank your honor; 



376 WIT AND HUMOR. 

but I wish I could see you JcnocJaed down in my parish^ 
wouldn't I bring a faction to the rescue ? " 

O'Conor, Charles.— O'Conor, of New York, was one 
of the greatest lawyers this country has produced. He 
impressed court and jury with his sincerity and high sense 
of honor, and with a style clear, forceful and often epi- 
grammatic. 

One day, in the early professional career of Eoscoe 
Conkling, he came into O'Conor's office in quite a nerv- 
ous state. 

" You seem to be very much excited," said O'Conor, as 
Eoscoe walked up and down the room 

"Yes, I'm provoked — I am provoked; I never had a 
client dissatisfied about my fee before." 

"Well, what's the matter?" said O'Conor. 

" Why, I defended Gibbons for arson, you know. He 
was convicted, but I did hard work for him. I took him 
to the Superior Court and he was convicted, then on to 
the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court confirmed 
the judgment and gave him ten years. I charged him 
$3,000, and now Gibbons is grumbling about it — says it's 
too much. Now, Mr. O'Conor, I ask you, was that too 
much?" 

" Well," said O'Conor, deliberately, " of course you did 
a good deal of work, and $3,000 is not a very big fee, but 
to be frank with you, Mr. Conkling, my deliberate opin- 
ion is that he might have been convicted for less money." 

O'Conor once met a friend on the street, who said : 
" I am on the way to attend the funeral of Mr. Kobert 

Stimpson ; won't you accompany me ? " 

O'Conor and Stimpson had been on bad social terms. 

" No, I cannot attend Mr. Stimpson's funeral under the 



BENCH AND BAR 377 

circumstances." But he reflected a few moments, and 
then replied : 

" On the whole, I think I ought to attend his funeral, 
for he would have been delighted to attend mine." 

O'Grady, Baron. — Justice O'Grady was a sarcastic 
ruler on the bench and a wit of considerable power. Thus, 
when a } 7 oung barrister resumed his seat, after laboring 
zealously for two hours to convince the court, O'Grady 
observed : 

"Well, sir, all that may be very fine, but I confess I 
cannot understand it." 

There is a class of shabby lawyers in Dublin whose prac- 
tice is exclusively confined to the defense of criminals 
at Green Street, the Irish Old Bailey. These gentlemen 
are sometimes clamorous and contumacious. O'Grady, 
however, had the happy knack of bringing them to a 
proper sense of their situation. One of these barristers, 
on the trial of a pickpocket, having been employed as 
counsel for the prosecution, assumed an imperious air, and 
took special care to reiterate loudly and frequently, for 
the information of his lordship, that he was counsel for 
the Crown. O'Grady bore this patiently for a time, till 
at last, when the pompous barrister again exclaimed he 
was counsel for the Crown, his lordship remarked: 

"Yes, sir, and I believe sometimes for the half-crown, 
too." 

An Irish attorney, not proverbial for his probity, was 
robbed one night in going from Wicklow to Dublin. His 
father, next day, meeting O'Grady, said: 

" My lord, have you heard of my son's robbery ? " 
" No," replied the baron ; " whom did he rob ? " 



378 WIT AND HUMOR. 

On a verdict of Not Guilty in a clear case of highway 
robbery O'Grady asked the clerk: 

" Is there any other charge against this honest man ? " 

Told there was not, he said: 

" Mi*. Jailor, as I am leaving Tralee on my way to Cork 
to-day, don't discharge this man until I have half an 
hour's start of him on the road." 

In a case tried before O'Grady, a wild, refractory peas- 
ant refused to answer a question as to character put to 
him by counsel, and said, " If ye ax me that ag'in I'll 
give ye a kick in the gob." 

"Does your lordship hear that language?" said coun- 
sel, appealing to the judge. " An answer to my question 
is essential to my client's case. What does your lordship 
advise me to do ? " 

" If you are resolved to repeat the question," said the 
judge, "I'd advise you to move a little from the witness." 

O'Grady had a dry humor and a biting wit. The lat- 
ter was so fine that its sarcasm was often unperceived by 
the object against whom it was directed. A legal friend 
of his, who was extremely studious, but in conversation 
exasperatingly dull, showed the judge over his newly- 
built house. The lawyer prided himself especially on a 
library that he had contrived for his own use, so secluded 
from the rest of the building that he could pore over his 
books in private, quite secure from disturbance. 

"This is splendid," exclaimed O'Grady. "My dear 
fellow, you could read and study here from morning till 
night, and no human being would be one bit the wiser." 

Oratory. — Hon. Thomas B. Keed, of Maine, writing 
of oratory, says: "You all remember Webster's statement 
that ' eloquence is in the man, the audience and the occa- 



BENCH AND BAR 379 

sion.' No one of the three can be lacking. The man is 
not enough, nor the audience, nor the occasion. I well 
remember once a hall filled with shouting thousands at 
the opening of the civil war, where the audience and the 
occasion were both worthy of eloquence, but the orator 
was not there, and the chilled audience sank back dis- 
heartened and weary." 

" A great speech," says Charles O'Conor, "is one thing, 
but the verdict is the thing." When he stood before the 
Supreme Court in Washington, endeavoring to win a 
hundred-thousand-dollar fee, some one asked O'Conor 
why he didn't use more oratory. He replied: 

" I wanted the hundred thousand dollars, not the empty 
applause. You can't sell orator}^ for a hundred thousand 
dollars, you have to give it away on the Fourth of July." 

Loose declamation may deceive the crowd, 
And seem more striking as it grows more loud. 

— Joseph Story. 

When Chief Justice Parsons, of Massachusetts, was 
practicing at the bar, a farmer, who had often heard him 
speak, was asked what sort of a pleader he was. 

" Oh, he is a good lawyer and an excellent counselor, 
but a poor pleader," was the reply. 

w But does he not win most of his cases ? " 

" Yes, but that's because he knows the law and can 
argue well; but he's no orator." 

A hard-headed bank president once congratulated him- 
self, in the presence of Mr. Mathews, on resisting, as a 
foreman of a jury, the oratorical blandishments of Mr. 
Choate. 

" Knowing his skill," said the hard-headed man, " in 
making white appear black and black white, I made up 
my mind at the outset that he should not fool me. He 



380 WIT AND HUMOR. 

tried all his arts, but it was of no use; I just decided ac- 
cording to the law and evidence." 

"Of course," answered Mr. Mathews, "you gave your 
verdict against Mr. Choate's client ? " 

"Why, no, we gave a verdict for his client; but then 
we couldn't help it, he had the law and the evidence on 
his side." 

It never occurred to the bank president or to the 
farmer that Choate and Parsons were after verdicts, not 
admiration. And they got them because they sunk the 
orator into the advocate. 

Hon. J. W. Donovan, of Detroit, whose bright books 
are an inspiration, writes eloquently of oratory — true 
oratory that touches the heart and sways the reason : 

As to the effect of eloquence, let me repeat what I have 
said once with emphasis: I have heard Gen. Butler in 
his powerful philippic on an Indianapolis editor, when 
hundreds stood upon the seats and shouted, "Hit him 
again! Give it to 'im! (smiting their hands together) 
Give it to him! " until I realized the force of " fighting 
eloquence." I have heard Gough give his nineteen re- 
wards to the faithful, looking up towards the heavens 
with expanded nerves, and eyes dilated, face all ablaze 
with magnetism, hands charged with electricity, and 
tones tuned with the finest melody. I have seen Ben- 
jamin F. Taylor when he marched the forces up the sides 
of Lookout Mountain, and pictured the battle above the 
clouds with life-like energy — pictured it so graphically 
that we could almost hear the final shout of victory that 
shook the hills of Tennessee, when the boys in gray re- 
treated from the boys in blue. I have heard the echoing 
shout receding over Cemetery Hill, caught up by Union 
forces and carried through the ranks of the entire Army 
of the Cumberland; I saw the audience sit spellbound at 



BENCH AND BAR. 381 

the close, dismissed by a wave of the chairman's hand, 
so touched by the grandeur of the scene that they marched 
out in silence from college chapel, and I called that elo- 
quence, — but it was imaginary. I have heard Phillips 
describe the conduct of a heroic general till he called be- 
fore us the mighty dead, like Napoleon, Wellington and 
Alexander, and, " dipping his finger in the sunlight," 
write on the blue arch of heaven the name of his bril- 
liant hero, and I was thrilled by his graphic description, — 
and even that was imaginary. And when a real picture 
came before me in a New York court room, and Beach 
was the champion of a wife discarded by a wealthy hus- 
band, and when I heard him rehearse her wrongs, and 
tell her simple story to a jury, and listened to their ver- 
dict of heavy damages, I knew, and felt, and realized the 
power and force of eloquence. 

The highest eloquence is the demonstration of the 
heroic. Such eloquence is, at last, but the self-manifesta- 
tion of the heroic spirit in its highest form. All heroic 
minds are thus eloquent, whenever the qualities that make 
them heroic are aroused and called into vigorous action. 
Eloquence is the spirit of men in operation. When such 
a soul acts it is eloquent in deeds ; when it speaks, it is 
eloquent in words. Chatham and Mirabeau, Demosthenes, 
Henry, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun alone in the Senate op- 
posing the Mexican war, and Washington when aroused, 
as on the field of Monmouth, possessed this eloquence in 
an eminent degree; and when it is called into exercise, 
common greatness shrinks appalled and cowed before its 
imperial authority. It is the rarest and most infallible 
of the gifts and marks of greatness ; for it displays in a 
burst of passionate energy the highest properties of man — 
great will, great courage, great intellect — the forces that 
command and subdue mankind. — Joseph G. Baldwin. 



3S2 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Intellect alone, however exalted, without strong feel- 
ings — without even sensibility — would be only like an 
immense magazine of powder, if there were no such ele- 
ment as fire in the natural world. It is the heart which 
is the spring and fountain of all eloquence. — Lord Erskine. 

"Oratory is a natural gift, not an acquirement," said a 
proud advocate after a long flight to the jury. 

" Oh, we're not blamin' you," said the hayseed client ; 
"you done the best you could." 

'Possum Ridge has a literary and debating society, the 
first meeting of which was held one night at the old log 
school-house up at the cross-roads. 'Squire Beeson, be- 
cause of his eminent fitness for the place, was chosen to 
preside, which he did in his usual happy manner, with a 
corncob pipe in his mouth, and his feet thrown up across 
the table. The question for debate was : " Resolved, That 
we owe a greater debt of gratitude to Washington than 
we do to Columbus." Judge Peters, a member of the 
County Court, led the discussion, sa} r ing: 

" Mr. President and Feller Citizens : In my opinion 
thar ain't no question ter be argyed, for it is all one-sided. 
Atwixt them thar two men anybody ort to know which 
has got the call on our gratichood. I hain't got nothin' 
agin Columbus, Mr. President, an' I ain't goin' to run 
him down. He wuz a good enough sort o' feller in his 
way, I reckon, but he wa'n't nowhers nigh sich a man as 
Washin'ton, an' what he done fer us wa'n't a patchin' to 
what Washin'ton done. Mr. President, 1 ax yer wher'd 
we a been terday if it hadn't been fer Mr. Washin'ton? 
Wher'd our kentry a been if it hadn't been fer him? 
Columbus wuz a fair sort o' feller, Mr. President. I ain't 
denyin' of that. But Washington wuz wuth a dozen of 
'im any day. Why, Mr. President, doorin' all the long 



BENCH AND BAR 383 

an' bloody war when battles wuz bein' fit an' giner'ls 
wuz bein' whupped, Washin'ton stood up fer our kentr y 
an' never got a lickin'. I've seed, sir, whar it was writ 
down that Giner'l Lee tried monstrous hard to cap- 
tur' Washin'ton, but he never wuz able ter do it. No, 
sir, nary time he never — Mr. Washin'ton wus too much 
fer him. Mr. President, if it hadn't a been fer Wash- 
in'ton, the South would a triumphed, an' the kentry 
would have been ruinated bowdeciously. What, I ax yer, 
could Grant an' Bonaparte an' Stonewall Jackson a done 
if Washin'ton hadn't a been thar ter help 'em? An' what, 
feller citizens, wuz Mr. Columbus a doin' of all this time ? 
Whar wuz he, Mr. President, while Washin'ton wuz a 
fightin' like a wildcat on a hot skillet an a puttin' of Jeff 
Davis down? (Wild applause.) Wuz he a fightin' of 
his kentry's battles, Mr. President ? No, sir, he wasn't. 
He never fit a lick fer his kentry. Now, Mr. President, 
you shorely can't fail to see which o' them fellers is en- 
titled to our gratichood. Mr. Columbus wuz a right peart 
sort o' feller, I reckon, but he wa'n't nowhar in compari- 
son to Mr. Washin'ton. Leavin' the question with yer, 
Mr. President, I'll now set down." 

The Rev. Isom Bledsaw, known as the " silver-tongued 
orator of 'Possum Ridge," next addressed the audience in 
reply to Judge Peters. He said : 

" Mr. President, Ladies, Gentlemen, and Feller Citizens 
of 'Possum Ridge: I'm here ter-night ter champion the 
cause o' one o' the greatest men this kentry has ever pro- 
duced. I'm here ter-night ter speak oat in favor o' the 
man who at his own expense went ter the trouble of dis- 
kivering us. The name of that man, feller citizens, is 
Columbus. My antagonist axes whar Columbus wuz while 
Washin'ton wuz fightin' of his kentry's battles, and I an- 
swer him, feller citizens, by sayin' that he wuz diskiverin' 



384 WIT AND HUMOR. 

of our kentiy. Mr. President, I ax ye, whar would we 
be now, if we hadn't been diskivered, an' what good 
would Mr. Washin'ton\s fi^htin' 'mount ter ? TTashin'ton 
wuz right smart punkins, I reckon, but he wa'n't knee- 
high to Columbus. Mr. Washin'ton wa'n't necessary to 
the savin' o' this here kentry, Mr. President. Thar wuz 
plenty o' others who'd a done it jest as well. But, Mr. 
President, whar is the man who'd a diskivered us if Co- 
lumbus hadn't? I say, Mr. President, that if it hadn't 
been fer him we wouldn't a been diskivered. Did any of 
ye ever figger up what it cost Mr. Columbus ter diskiver 
us ? Gentlemen, it must a cost more than it does ter run 
a four-months district school. (Hear, hear!) Yes, sir, 
I tell ye diskiverin' countries is high-priced work an' 
costs lots. Mr. President, I've sot down." 

There is an amusing letter from Erskine, when he sat 
in the House of Commons, describing the effect produced 
on the House by Burke's speech on conciliation with 
America — in some respects the finest of all his speeches, 
not only for its eloquence, but for the breadth and prac- 
tical wisdom of its political philosophy. The speech must 
certainly have occupied more than two hours in delivery, 
yet Erskine says that Burke had not been speaking half an 
hour when he emptied the House. Erskine himself got 
bored ; but, anxious not to hurt Burke's feelings, he crawled 
toward the door on all fours, and thus escaped unseen. 
He goes on to add that, on reading the report of the 
speech, he was electrified by its power and eloquence. 

It's a great mistake to think anything too profound or 
rich for a popular audience. No train of thought is too 
deep, or subtle, or grand, — but the manner of presenting 
it to their untutored minds should be peculiar. It should 
be presented in anecdote, or sparkling truism, or telling 



BENCH AND BAR. 385 

illustration, or stinging epithet; always in some concrete 
form, never in a logical, abstract syllogistic shape. 

— Rufus Choate. 

Oswald, James Francis.— Oswald figures in many 
good stories of the English bar. He was the junior who, 
on being told by Justice Kay that, " although he could 
teach him law, he could not teach him manners," quietly 
remarked, " That is so, my lud." 

Oswald's encounter with Justice Chitty was hardly so 
successful He had been addressing the court at great 
length in a bill-of-sale case, and at last said : 

"And now, my lud, I address myself to the furniture." 
" You have been doing that for some time, Mr. Oswald," 
was his honor's reply. 

Otis, Harrison Gray. — It was said of Otis, the dis- 
tinguished leader of the Boston bar, that he wielded an 
extraordinary power of persuasion, and that when he 
came before the court it sometimes damaged him. He 
relied too much upon it. Once, while arguing a case be- 
fore a jury, Judge Parsons said: 

"Brother Otis, don't waste your time on that point; 
there is nothing in it." 

Otis stopped, looked the judge in the face, bowed, and, 
turning to the jury, went on to another point in the case. 

"Nor on that, either, Brother Otis; don't waste your 
time." 

Otis bowed again, went to a third point, and was again 
interrupted by the judge. Somewhat annoyed, he turned 
to the bench, and said: 

" I regret to find myself unable to please the court this 
morning." 

"Brother Otis," replied the judge, with a pleasant 
smile, "you always please the court when you are right." 
25 



386 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Long before railway lines were in operation, Otis bad 
an important case to argue in Boston on Monday, and 
having been detained in New York until Saturday, he 
left that city in his gig, rode on till late Saturday night, 
when he put up at a New England village inn, and re- 
sumed his journey Sunday morning. He had gone but a 
few steps from the tavern before a grave personage, known 
as a "tithing-man," stepped up, took his horse by the 
head, and coolly informed Otis that he was arrested for 
traveling on the Sabbath, and must proceed with him to 
the jail. Otis replied: 

"Sir, I respect the day and the law; but I shall be 
obliged to break your head as well as the Sabbath, if you 
do not let me quietly go on my way." 

But the officer was not to be bluffed off in this manner. 
He said he knew his duty, and should do it. Otis then 
drew oat from his portmanteau a volume which the of- 
ficial recognized as the statutes of the state, and remarked 
very blandly: 

" Well, my friend, it won't do any hurt to look at the 
law a little." 

"Oh, no," said the tithing-man; "you will find it all 
there." 

Otis read aloud, "If any person shall be guilty of Sab- 
bath-breaking as aforesaid, it shall be lawful for the 
tithing-man to arrest and stop him;" and then he added, 
"The law is against me, I must admit." 

" Well, then," rejoined the tithing-man, "you must make 
up your mind to quarter in the lock-up until to-morrow; 
so, if you please, we will ride back together." 

" Oh, no ! " retorted Otis, " that will never do. I don't 
intend that you shall ride back, or anywhere else, with 
me to-day. The statute reads, mind you, that vou shall 
arrest and stop; that's all. You can stop me as long as 



BENCH AND BAR. 387 

you please ; but that is the extent of your power. The 
law says nothing at all about your carrying me off to the 
lock-up, nor of your riding in my gig on the Sabbath 
either ! " 

It was a stormy day. The poor tithing-man was com- 
pletely drenched; and the prospect of standing by the 
gig all day and night in a muddy road was by no means 
either pleasant or compatible with the dignity of his office. 

Otis again repeated with entire composure, " I still wish 
you to consider, sir, that I am your prisoner — for so 
reads the law; nothing more. You can go back if you 
please, but I intend to stop where I am." 

So saying, the old lawyer drew his cloak around him, 
and made preparations for a quiet snooze until Monday 
morning, if the tithing-man maintained his watch until 
that far-distant day. The poor fellow looked as blue as 
indigo, and really felt quite as uncomfortable as a young 
gosling in a shower. He gazed a moment or two upon 
the composed expression of the sheltered and complacent 
lawyer, and without saying a word — for his feelings 
were too big for utterance — he relinquished his prey, 
and went home to meditate on the mysteries of the law 
and the plainer precepts of the gospel. 

Otis lingered just long enough to permit the officer to 
get fairly around the corner, and then he proceeded on his 
journey, getting out of the state as soon as possible, lest he 
should not so easily get out of the hands of the law if he 
were caught again. 

Park, Allan. — The late Justice Park, of England, ac- 
quired the habit of thinking aloud; and often, while a 
case was proceeding, muttered to himself, in accents dis- 
tinct and audible, what he thought of it. At the trial 
of a prisoner charged with having stolen a quantity of 



388 WIT AND HUMOR. 

fagots, it remained only to identify the fagots found in 
his possession as the property of the prosecutor. One of 
the witnesses having distinctly identified the fagots pro- 
duced as being those stolen from the prosecutor, Park 
was overheard by the counsel for the prisoner to mutter 
to himself: 

"Fagots, fagots, fagots! How can any man swear to 
the identity of fagots ? They are as like each other as a 
couple of eggs." 

The learned counsel took no notice of what he had 
overheard, but allowed the trial to proceed in the usual 
manner. At length it came to his turn to address the 
court on behalf of the prisoner. He dwelt for some time 
on the minor points w r hich he conceived to be in favor of 
his client; and then said, with great ingenuity and a 
marked emphasis: 

" But, gentlemen of the jury, I now come to the most im- 
portant thing in favor of the prisoner. Gentlemen, I put it 
to you, and J am sure the learned judge on the bench will 
concur with me in the importance which I attach to the 
point — I put it to you, whether it was not a most daring 
and presumptuous act on the part of the last witness when 
he ventured to swear to the identity of the fagots pro- 
duced with those stolen from the prosecutor. Fagots, 
fagots, fagots; why, gentlemen, you must know that fag- 
ots are as like each other as a couple of eggs. How then 
dare any man swear to the identity of fagots ? I am 
sure — " 

" Stop, stop ; stop a moment, Mr. ," hastily inter- 
rupted Park. " Gentlemen of the jury, I think I see in 
what the learned counsel has just said a special interpo- 
sition of Divine Providence to save an innocent man from 
ignominy and punishment; for the very same argument 
in favor of the prisoner occurred to my mind a quarter 



BENCH AND BAR 389 

of an hour ago, and, as nearly as could be, in the very 
words which the learned counsel has just made use of. 
Gentlemen of the jury, there must be a kind of inspira- 
tion in this: fagots are as like as eggs; no man can swear 
to their identity, and the best thing you can do is to ac- 
quit the prisoner at once." 

The jury responded at once by a verdict of not guilty. 

Perkins, Eli. — "I studied law in the Washington 
Law School," says Perkins. " In fact, I was admitted to 
the bar. I shall never forget my first case. Neither 
will my client. I was called upon to defend a young 
man for passing counterfeit money. I knew he was in- 
nocent, because I lent him the money that caused him 
to be arrested. Well, there was a hard feeling against 
the defendant in the county, and I pleaded for a change 
of venue. I made a great plea for it. I can remember 
even now how fine it was. It was filled with choice 
rhetoric and passionate oratory. I quoted Kent and 
Blackstone and Littleton, and cited precedent after prece- 
dent from the Digest and State Eeports. I wound up 
with a tremendous argument, amidst the applause of all 
the younger members of the bar. Then, sanguine of suc- 
cess, I stood and waited the judge's decision. It soon 
came. The judge looked me full in the face, and said: 

" < Your argument is good, Mr. Perkins, very good, and 
I've been deeply interested in it, and when a case comes 
up that your argument fits, I shall give your remarks all 
the consideration they merit. Sit down.' 

" This is why I gave up law and resorted to lecturing 
and writing for the newspapers." 

Peters, John Andrew. — In one of the interior coun- 
ties of Maine, a case was called that had been many years 



390 WIT AND HUMOR 

in litigation. Judge Peters thought it impracticable to 
keep the suit longer in court, and, advising the parties to 
arbitrate the matter, they agreed to refer the case to three 
honest men. With a grave smile, the judge said the case 
involved certain legal points which would require one of 
the referees, at least, to have some knowledge of law; 
therefore he would suggest the propriety of selecting one 
lawyer and two honest men. 

In the fusion campaign of 1855 that elected Samuel 
Wells governor, Peters addressed a large gathering at 
night when his fellow-citizens rallied en masse with torch- 
lights in the street. Upon being introduced he began : 

" Fellow Democrats — " 

But at that moment a sudden gust of wind extinguished 
the torches. It became inky dark. For an instant it was 
very still. The judge might have been astonished, but he 
wasn't. He began again: 

" Fellow Democrats," he shouted, " the wind has blown 
out our lights. It is so dark that I cannot see my hands 
before my eyes. I cannot see you, fellow Democrats, but 
I know you are all here. / can smell you in the sweet 
and pleasant air." 

Peters asked Mr. Condy for the loan of a law book. 
The latter said : 

" With pleasure I wall send it to you." 

" That," said the judge, " will be truly Condy-sending." 

Peters, Richard. — Peters, of Eastern Pennsylvania, 
noted for his wit and brilliant social qualities, was an 
eminent United States district judge from 1789 to 1828. 

The sign on his office wdndow at the commencement of 
his professional career — "Kichard Peters, Attorney-at- 
law. Business done at half price. N. B. Half done," 



BENCH AND BAR. 391 

tickled more fees out of country clients than could have 
been secured by more serious means. 

Peters and Judge Washington of the Supreme Court — 
a quiet, severe man — were warm friends. Peters often 
remarked, " Brother Washington is the strict judge, and 
I am the district judge." 

Lafayette and Peters rode together in the great proces- 
sion in Philadelphia. Lafayette complained of the dust. 
Peters laughed, and explained his mirth by saying that, 
being a judge, he was used to having dust thrown in his 
eyes. 

Pettifogger and Shyster.— The late E. G. Eyan, of 
the Wisconsin Supreme Court, was a jurist of great ability. 
Fearless independence and a terrible vigor of expression 
were marked characteristics of the man. His description 
of two vermin of the legal profession is a bit of portrait- 
ure unexcelled in legal literature: 

" Behold the pettifogger, the blackleg of the law ! He 
is, as his name imports, a stirrer up of small litigation ; a 
wet-nurse of trifling grievances and quarrels. He some- 
times emerges from professional obscurity, and is charged 
with business which is disreputable only through his tort- 
uous devices. For the vermin cannot forego his instincts, 
even among his betters. He is generally found, however, 
and he always begins, in the lowest professional grade. 
Indeed, he is the troglodyte of the law. He has great 
cunning. He mistakes it for intelligence. He is a fel- 
low of infinite pretence. He pushes himself everywhere, 
and is self-important wherever he goes. You will often 
find him in legislative bodies, in political conventions, in 
boards of supervisors, in common councils. He is some- 
times there for specific villainy; sometimes on general 



392 WIT AND HUMOR 

principles of corruption, waiting on Providence for anj 
fraudulent job. He is always there for evil. The temper 
of his mind, the habits of his life, make him essentially 
mischievous. In all places he is virtually dishonest. When 
he cannot cheat for gain he cheats for love. He haunts 
low places, and herds with the ignorant. It is his kindly 
office to set them by the ears, and to feed his vanity and 
his pocket from the quarrels he incites or foments. He 
is in everybody's way, and pries into everybody's busi- 
ness. He meddles in all things, and is indefatigable in 
mischief. . He is just lawyer enough to be mischievous. 
He is a living example of Pope's truth, that a little learn- 
ing is a dangerous thing. Among his ignorant compan- 
ions he is infallible in all things. Sometimes he is reserved 
and sly, with knowing looks which gain credit for wisdom 
and character, for thinking all that he does not utter. 
Generally he is loquacious, demonstrative of his small 
eloquence. Then his mouth is too loose for truth. By 
his own account he is full of law and overflowing. Among 
his credulous dupes he cannot keep it down. He knows 
all things. Nothing is new to him. Nothing surprises 
him. Nothing puzzles him. But it is in the law that his 
omniscience shows best. His talk is of law incessantly. 
He has a chronic flux of law, among his followers. He 
prates law mercilessly to every one, except to lawyers. 
He discourses of his practice and his success to the janitor 
of his office and the charwoman who washes his windows. 
He revels in demonstrative absurdity and boasts of all he 
never did. He is the guide, philosopher and friend of 
vicious ignorance. He is the oracle of dullness. He hangs 
much around the justices' courts. There he is the leader 
of the bar. But he finds his way into the courts of rec- 
ord. In them he is a plague to the bar and an offence to 
the bench. He is flippant, plausible, captious, insolent. 



BENCH AND BAR. 393 

He is full of sharp practice, chicane, surprise and trick. 
He is the privateer of the court, plundering on all hands, 
on private account. He is ready to sell his client or him- 
self. He is equal to all things, above nothing, and be- 
low nothing. He is ready to be the coroner of the county, 
or the chief justice of the United States. He would be a 
bore if he were not too dangerous for that harmless 
function. He is a rm'sance to the bar and an evil to so- 
ciety. He is a fraud upon the profession and the public ; 
a lawyer among clowns and a clown among lawyers. 

"There is a variety of the animal known by the classic 
name of shyster. He has forced the word into at least 
one dictionary, and I may use it without offence. This 
is a still lower specimen; the pettifogger pettifogged 
upon; a troglodyte who penetrates depths of still deeper 
darkness. He has all the common vices of the family, 
and some special vices of his own. This creature fre- 
quents criminal courts, and there delights in criminal 
practice. He is the familiar of bailiffs and jailers; and 
has a sort of undefined partnership with them, in thieves, 
ruffians and the thousand-and-one violators of the law. 
These he defends or betrays, according to the exigencies 
of his relations with their captors or prosecutors. He has 
confidential relations with those who dwell in the debata- 
ble land between industry and crime. He is a friend of 
pimps and fences. He has intimacies among the most 
vicious men and women. He is the standing counsel of 
gambling dens and houses of ill-fame. He knows all 
about the criminals in custody, and has extensive acquaint- 
ance among those at large. He is conversant with their 
habits of life, and calls them familiarly by their Christian 
names. He prowls around the purlieus of jails and peni- 
tentiaries, seeking clients, inventing offences, organiz'ng 
perjury, tampering with turnkeys, and tolling prisoners. 



394 WIT AND HUMOR 

He levies blackmail on all hands. His effrontery is be- 
yond all shame. He thinks all lawyers are as he, but not 
so smart. He believes in the integrity of no man; in the 
virtue of no woman. He loves vice better than virtue. 
He enjo} T s darkness better than light. His habits of life 
lead him to the back lanes and dark alleys of the world. 
He is the counsel of guilt, the attorney-general of crime." 

" You follow the legal profession," said a gentleman to 
a shyster. 

"No, sir; I lead it." 

Chief Justice Andrews, of Connecticut, on the shyster 
element of the bar: 

" If once the practice becomes to him a mere 'brawl for 
hire,' or a system of legal plunder where craft and not 
conscience is the rule, and where falsehood and truth 
are the means by which to gain his ends, then he forfeits 
all right to be an officer in any court of justice, or to be 
numbered among the members of an honorable profes- 
sion." 

Skill in examination is perhaps one of the most impor- 
tant qualifications of the attorney, and, in considering the 
big retainers of the present day, the mind runs back to 
an exhibition of skill in an Ohio county court many years 
ago, in a murder case, in which a pettifogging cross-roads 
lawyer was retained for his reputed skill in criminal cases. 
On cross-examination he went at the witness in this style : 

"Now (ahem), Mr. Tompkins, you say you saw the de- 
fendant kill the man ? " 

"Yes, sir." 

"Yes — well — how do you know it was the defend- 
ant?" 

"Because I saw him." 

" But, sir, how did you know it was him ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 395 

" I've known him for thirty years." 

" You have ? " 

"Yes." 

" Known him all that time ? " 

"Yes." 

" You state it under oath." 

"Yes." 

"How did he kill him?" 

" He shot him with a revolver." 

" How do you know ? " 

" I saw him." 

" Did you see the revolver ? " 

" Certainly." 

" Did you see it revolve ? " 

" No, sir." 

" Aha ! How do you know it was a revolver ? " 

" It looked like one." 

" Um-huh ! Did you see him pull the trigger ? " 

" No, of course not." 

" Ah ! Then you admit he didn't pull the trigger ? " 

" I saw the blaze and smoke." 

"Did you see any bullet in the blaze and smoke? 
Would the blaze and smoke have caused death ? " 

" No, of course not." 

" Then what danger was there in firing ? " 

" The bullet was found in the victim's head." 

" Did you see any bullet strike the deceased ? " 

" Of course not." 

The attorney solemnly arose and addressed the court : 

"Here is a man who swears that he saw one man kill 
another with a revolver, yet he never saw the bullet leave 
the pistol nor strike the victim. He didn't even see the 
man pull the trigger." 

"Are you addressing the court?" asked the judge. 



396 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" Why, certainly, if your honor please." 
" How do you know ? " 
" Why, your honor certainly hears me." 
" Yes, but you neither see your words leave your mouth 
nor hear them strike the court's ears." 
The attorney sat down. 

Hon. H. M. Wiltse, of Chattanooga, in a fine address 
before the Tennessee State Bar Association, picturesquely 
describes the "shyster: " 

" The brute shyster is known to all men who have ever 
bsen about the courts of cities and towns. He is found 
mostly in police and magistrates' courts. There he is a 
past-master of the arts of impudence, swagger and cun- 
ning. 

" Once get him into a court where some pretence is 
made to decency and decorum, and he is usually a cring- 
ing cur. 

" No decent lawyer, probably, ever feels so utterly help- 
less, so c like a cat in a strange garret,' as when he finds 
himself obliged to enter where these creatures are at home, 
to try a case with one of them opposed to him. They 
gloat over the opportunity to get even with respectability 
by offering it indignity. It becomes at once an occasion 
for violence or submission to indignity. Yiolence is out 
of the question, and if he calls for the intervention of the 
presiding officer he nearly always finds that officer on the 
side of the brute, because the brute is his best patron. He 
must submit to indignity, and, because he must, he ought 
to charge and receive an extra fee rather than a less one, 
every time he is obliged to practice in such, places and 
under such circumstances. 

" The reptile shyster is a bit below the brute shyster, be- 
cause he does not know so much and has less natural sense. 
He is, like the other, the daily instrumentality of imposi- 



BENCH AND BAR 397 

tion, injustice, tyranny, robbery. Unfortunately the worst 
of his offences, like the most of them, never come to light. 

" The vermin shyster needs little description. He would 
belong to the brute class, or at least the reptile class, if 
he had the sense and strength, but he has neither. He 
has been a justice of the peace, a constable, or may be 
a deputy sheriff, professional witness or juror, and has 
given no thought to anything save the most easily learned 
tricks of his ideals. He gets the license because the judge 
or the committee thinks he will do but little harm, and 
perhaps he does, — yet he is a very persistent pest; a par- 
asite not to be much discussed here. He is dismissed 
without prejudice, but with a deal of quiet contempt. 

" The judge who allows a man of this character to se- 
cure license ought to be impeached. The committeeman 
who recommends one for license ought to be disbarred 
and then beaten with many stripes. A decent lawyer 
who associates with one of either of the classes described, 
in such a way as to give him a semblance of professional 
standing, ought to be ' fined to the full extent of the 
law.' 

" Not many years since, a man was killed by a railway 
train within the borders of Tennessee. The first infor- 
mation that his family received of his death was by tele- 
gram from a firm of attorneys, offering their services for 
suit against the company. 

" There are others who ' work ' their church and social 
relations secretly and openly for the upbuilding of their 
practice. I know one of these who has been connected 
with approximately half of the denominations and wor- 
shiped in more than half of the church edifices of a 
town which is rather noted for the extent and variety of 
its religious interests and advantages. Some of them go 
into the choirs, and squall the most grotesque tenor or 



398 WIT AND HUMOR 

growl the most excruciating bass, without any just cause 
or provocation, to mortal ken, other than the presump- 
tion that their performances advertise to the world that 
they quote bad Latin and disturb the air with bad oratory 
in court rooms. If God can forgive such fellows for such 
conduct, then, indeed, may it be said that salvation is 
free. 

"I do not pretend to have half exhausted the subject, 
but the subject has exhausted me. Perhaps time spent 
in writing about the shyster is time w r asted. But he is 
a constant rebuke to the courts and to the worthy mem- 
bers of the profession. He is a constant menace to its in- 
terests. He robs the w T orthy of much which legitimately 
belongs to them in the way of emolument, and, what is 
worse, he filches the good name of the best and greatest 
of professions, and is gradually making it a by-word upon 
the lips of those who cannot discriminate between the 
clean and the unclean. 

" The profession usually knows the shyster and places 
the proper estimate upon him. But even the profession is 
becoming dull in discrimination, and because the populace 
applauds him as ' sharp,' ' cute,' ' up-to-snuff ,' and the like, 
many of us are learning, being too familiar with his face. 
to at least very patiently endure him." 

A cunning joke is credited to Sir Joseph Jekyll, in al- 
lusion to Attorney Else, of diminutive stature and shady 
reputation. Meeting Jekyll he said : 

"I hear you have called me a pettifogging scoundrel; 
have you ? " 

" Sir," replied Jekyll, with a look of contempt, " I never 
said you were a pettifogger or a scoundrel, but I said that 
you were little Else" 

Phillips, John P.— Judge Phillips, of the United 
States District Court, Kansas City, Missouri, is one of the 



BENCH AND BAR 399 

brilliant jurists of the West. His wit and humor sparkle 
with gems of wisdom : 

I was once engaged in trying before a jury an impor- 
tant cause. Associated with me were my partners, Judge 
Hicks, and George Test, now United States Senator from 
Missouri. Judge Hicks always had a theory upon which 
the case was to be tried. He had studied much about 
the case on trial. I was conducting the cross-examina- 
tion of an important witness, by whom I developed an 
unexpected fact dangerous to the adversary. Whereat 
the old judge shook me by the arm and impatiently said : 
" You are getting away from our theory of the case." 
Yest interposed, with characteristic impetuosity and quick 
discernment: "To the devil with the theory, Phillips, 
beat the case on the facts," which we did. 

The old-fashioned common-law lawyer belongs to the 
silurian epoch. Like a grandfather's clock, a useful and 
ornamental piece of furniture in its day, now set up in 
the corner covered with dyspeptic cobwebs and interest- 
ing reminiscences, that never more strikes, he sits in his 
unswept office, wrapped in the solitude of his originality, 
in austere isolation, surrounded with a few venerable 
books, like Blackstone's Commentaries, Chitty's Plead- 
ings, Fearne on Remainders, Coke's Littleton, Comyn's 
Digest, Gow on Partnership, the first edition of Phillips 
on Evidence, and a law glossary. They are his regiment- 
als of the Revolution. He is almost sublime in his con- 
tempt for the innovations of modern commerce, science 
and law. He spurns even a cuspidor, as he uses his shirt 
bosom as a more democratic convenience. You will hear 
people say of this old fossil : " He is not an orator nor a 
hustler, but he is a great common-law lawyer." But 
what does he amount to in this day, clientless, ruminat- 
ing over days gone by, when, like a snail in its shell, he 



400 WIT AND HUMOR. 

imagined the boundary walls of his legal vision circunv 
scribed the whole universe? Commerce has come and 
added new continents of trade to the geography of the 
world, checkering the earth with railroads, exploring new 
seas whitened with sheets of canvas, catching every gale 
of prosperity. Electricity has come from the sky, and 
girdled the earth with fire, harnessed for the indefinite 
multiplication of mechanical power. Civil engineering 
has tunneled through and leaped over the mountains, 
while the earth trembles with the onward march of civ- 
ilization, its bowels groaning with the vexing forces of 
applied physics, to make it give up its hidden treasures 
for the enrichment of the human race. "With all this 
material development and progress has come the im- 
perious necessity for the development of law; the ap- 
plication and extension of old principles to meet new 
conditions; the introduction of new statutes and the es- 
tablishment of new customs, calling for construction and 
assimilation. 

The evolutions of civilization are marked in legal science. 
The man who was a successful practitioner twenty years 
ago, and then closed his office and went out into the 
mountains, " far removed from the madding crowd's iff- 
noble strife," were he to return to the court-house in Den- 
ver or Colorado Springs and hear a case on trial involving 
the flexible, adjustable principles of equity jurisprudence, 
to meet the exigencies springing out of commercial and 
corporation development and the complications arising 
from mammoth enterprises, would be little less amazed 
and lost than was Kip Van Winkle when he descended 
from his mountain sleep to his native village. And if he 
had left Colorado twenty years ago, and in that period 
had not read a reported case, and on his return should 
step into a Denver court-house, and find on trial a mining 



BENCH AND BAR. 401 

case involving original discovery of ore in place, the par- 
allelism of end line, the pursuit of the " dip," and con- 
tinuity of vein, demanding a knowledge of chemistry, 
mineralogy, geology, surveying and photography — to 
say nothing of the marvelous advancement in expert tes- 
timony and the art of lying; and then should be told 
something about the more recent amplification of the 
rights of tunnel owners ; or were to hear read one of Mr. 
Green's bills in equity against the owners of " The Little 
Johnny Lode," he would know that he would have to 
be born again before he could minister in the Temple of 
Justice. 

Phillips, Wendell. — Phillips, famous as an orator 
and lecturer, graduated at the Harvard Law School in 
1834 

At a New England dinner at Plymouth, in December, 
1855, Phillips paid a worthy tribute to the sturdy found- 
ers of empire on this side of the water. One of his illus- 
trative stories was: 

" The Phiilipses, Mr. President, did not come from 
Plymouth; they made their longest stay at Andover. 
Let me tell you an Andover story. One day, a man 
went into a store there, and began telling about a fire. 
' There had never been such a fire,' he said, ' in the county 
of Essex. A man going by Deacon Pettingil's barn saw 
an owl on the ridge-pole. He fired at the owl, and the 
wadding, somehow or other, getting into the shingles, set 
the hay on fire, and it was all destroyed, — ten tons of 
hay, six head of cattle, the finest horse in the country, 
etc. The deacon was nearly crazed by it.' The men in 
the store began exclaiming and commenting on it. ' What 
a loss,' says one. 'Why the deacon will well-nigh break 
down under it," says another. And so they went on, 



402 WIT AND HUMOR. 

speculating one after another, and the conversation 
drifted on in all sorts of conjectures. At last, a quiet 
man, who sat spitting in the fire, looked up, and asked, 
6 Did he hit the owl ? ' (Great applause.) That man was 
made for the sturdy reformer, of one idea." 

You can always get the truth from an American states- 
man after he has turned seventy or given up all hope of 
the Presidency. 

Our self-made men are the glory of our institutions. 

There is a class among us so conservative that they 
are afraid the roof will come down if you sweep off the 
cobwebs. 

Men cry out against sentiment as though it were weak- 
ness. But what is Bunker Hill monument ? Sentiment ! 
Why did Massachusetts send the bust of Sam Adams to 
stand in the rotunda at Washington ? Sentiment ! This 
is the strongest element in the strongest character. A 
package was found among the papers of Dean Swift — 
that old, fierce hater, his soul full of gall, who faced Eng- 
land in her maddest hour and defeated her Avith his pen 
charged with lightning hotter than Junius's. Wrapped 
up among his choicest treasures was found a lock of hair. 
" Only a woman's hair," was the motto. Deep down in 
that heart, full of strength and fury, there lay this foun- 
tain of sentiment, calming and shaping all that character. 
Nelson, on the broad sea, a thousand miles off, signaled, 
" England expects every man to do his duty." What was 
that ? Sentiment ! It made a hero of every sailor. Yes, 
it made every sailor a Nelson. Caesar, crossing the Alps, 
drew his whole army aside to spare a tree. 

Every step of progress the world has made has been 
from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake. 






BENCH AND BAR 403 

One, on God's side, is a majority. 

Teach the world once for all that North America be- 
longs to the Stars and Stripes, and under them no man 
shall wear a chain. 

" The keynote to the oratory of Wendell Phillips," re- 
marks a competent critic, " lay in this: that it was essen- 
tially conversational, — the conversational raised to its 
highest power. Perhaps no orator ever spoke with so little 
apparent effort, or began so entirely on the plane of his 
average hearers. It was as if he simply repeated, in a 
louder tone, what he had just been saying to some famil- 
iar friend at his elbow. The effect was absolutely dis- 
arming. Those accustomed to spread-eagle eloquence 
felt, perhaps, a slight sense of disappointment. Could 
this easy, effortless man be "Wendell Phillips ? But he 
held them by his very quietness; it did not seem to have 
occurred to him to doubt his power to hold them. The 
poise of his manly figure, the easy grace of his attitude, 
the thrilling modulation of his perfectly trained voice, 
the dignity of his gesture, the keen penetration of his eye, 
all aided to keep his hearers in hand. The colloquialism 
was never relaxed; but it was familiarity without loss of 
keeping. When he said isnH or wasn't, or even, like an 
Englishman, dropped his g's, it did not seem inelegant; 
he might almost have been ungrammatical, and it would 
not have impaired the fine air of the man. Then, as the 
argument went on, the voice grew deeper, the action 
more animated, and the sentences came in a long, sono- 
rous swell, still easy and graceful, but powerful as the 
soft stretching of a tiger's paw. He could be terse as 
Carlyle, or his periods could be as prolonged and cumu- 
lative as those of Choate or Evarts: no matter; they car- 
ried in either case the same charm." 



404 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Pleading, Special.— Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, in 
his address to the law students of Birmingham, said, in 
referring to the technical rules of the English practice 
in 1847: 

"The ruling power in the courts in 1847 was Baron 
Park, a man of great and wide legal learning, an admir- 
able scholar, a kind-hearted and amiable man, and of re- 
markable force of mind. These great qualities he devoted 
to heightening all the absurdities and contracting to the 
very utmost the narrowness of the system of special 
pleading. The client was unthought of. . . . The 
right was nothing, the mode of stating everything." 

Punch gives a humorous thrust at the cold, technical 
logic of special pleading under the old common law: 

Before administering law between litigating parties, 
there are two things to be done, in addition to the par- 
ties themselves, namely: First, to ascertain the subject 
for decision, and, secondly, to complicate it so as to make 
it difficult to decide. This is effected by letting the law- 
yers state in complicated terms the simple cases of their 
clients, and thus raising from these opposition statements 
a mass of entanglement which the clients themselves 
might call nasty crotchets, but which the lawyers term 
nice points. In every subject of dispute with two sides 
to it, there is a right and a wrong ; but in the style of put- 
ting the contending statements so as to confuse the right 
and the wrong together, the science of special pleading 
consists. This system is of such remote antiquity that no- 
body knows the beginning of it, and this accounts for no 
one being able to appreciate its end. The accumulated 
chicanery and blundering of several generations, called 
in forensic language the wisdom of successive ages, gradu- 
ally brought special pleading into its present shape, or, 
rather, into its present endless forms. Its extensive drain 



BENCH AND BAR. 405 

pn the pockets of the suitors has rendered it always an 
important branch of legal study; while, when properly 
understood, it appears an instrument so beautifully calcu- 
lated for distributive justice, that, when brought to bear 
upon property, it will often distribute the whole of it 
among the lawyers and leave nothing for the litigants 
themselves. 

In the Memoir of Lord Bramwell is a telling illustra- 
tion of the fact that reputation clings to us, even after 
many years. The great jurist as a little lad became a 
pupil at Doctor Reddy's school, where the late Baron 
Channell, three years his senior, was head boy. 

Channell read for the law, and the two school friends 
scarcely met again until, years afterward, Mr. Channell 
held a brief in a certain case at Maidstone assizes. 

Consultation with the solicitors showed a flaw in the 
pleadings drawn by them. It was of a sort which in 
those days would prove fatal to the case. The solicitors 
could only hope that it would not be discovered. 

" Who is against us ? " asked Channell. 

" Oh," was the reply, " a Mr. Bramwell. Eobodjr ever 
heard of him before." 

" Then, gentlemen," said the advocate, " we're done. I 
was at school with that gentleman." 

He was right. Bramwell was too clever for them, and 
they were " done " indeed. 

An action for an excessive seizure of goods under a dis- 
tress warrant, at the suit of a farmer against the Rev. 
Theophilus Sumner, D. D., was tried before Justice Ball. 
The junior counsel for the plaintiff, in the course of open- 
ing the pleadings, said : " There are several counts, my 
lord, the last of which is for the wrongful conversion of 
the plaintiff's cow." 



406 WIT AND HUMOR 

" Do I hear aright ? " said the judge ; " conversion of 
the plaintiff's cow, did you say ? Who effected this mar- 
velous conversion ? " 

" The reverend defendant, my lord." 

"Wonderful! wonderful! Will counsel kindly read 
the count describing how the cow was induced to adopt 
the Christian faith ? " 

"It isn't that, my lord," said counsel, amid roars of 
laughter, and from his brief he read : " And also that the 
defendant converted the plaintiff's cow to his own use." 

Pleas. — An Irishman, who had doubtless been "blue 
mouldin' for want of a batin'," and could not resist the 
temptation to have a little exercise, was arraigned before 
Judge Brady, of New York, on a charge of assault and 
battery. He listened with rapt attention to the reading 
of the indictment. When that was ended, Mr. Yancler- 
voort, the clerk, asked him, in accordance with the form 
then in use: 

" Do you demand a trial on this indictment ? " 

Pat, leaning forward in seeming utter ignorance of what 
had been asked him, said: 

"What's that?" 

Yandervoort, a little dashed by the manner of the man, 
repeated the question; and the response was: 

" The divil a thrial I want ! Ye needn't give yourself 
the throuble of thryin' me ! Ye may as well save the ex- 
pinse of that and put me down innocent. Contint am I 
to lave this wid me blessin' on ye ! Indade I'm anxious, 
for me boss is waitin' for me bey ant! Oh, no, no; the 
divil a thrial I want at all, at all ! " 

All this was said so rapidly that Yandervoort could not 
interpose to stop it; and the prisoner having, as he sup- 
posed, settled the business, attempted to leave the court, 



BENCH AND BAR. 407 

but was of course prevented. Vandervoort, when the 
mirth had subsided, changed the question, and asked : 

" Are you guilty or not guilty ? " 

"What's that?" said he again, leaning forward with 
his hand to his ear, as if he had not heard the question. 

" Are you guilty or not guilty ? " 

" Arrah ! how can I tell till I hear the ividence ? " 

He got a taste of the evidence and — thirty days. 

" Guilty or not guilty ? " said a judge to a native of the 
Emerald Islo. 

" Just as your honor plazes. It's not for the like o' 
me to dictate to your honor's worship." 

David Sands, a prominent, witty and successful attor- 
ney in a rural section of New York, half a century ago, 
was employed to defend a client indicted for an assault 
and battery. When the case was called, Sands asked 
leave to file the following pleas : 

" JSTot guilty, son assault demesne, manus molliter impos- 
uit, the statute of limitations, and the following poetical 

one: 

Primus strokus, 

Sine jocus, 

Absolutus est provocus.** 

So astounded was the illiterate prosecuting attorney — 
who had never heard of the pleas before — that he ex- 
claimed : " Is the man mad ? " 

" May it please the court," said Sands, with an air of 
well-counterfeited contempt, " if the gentleman can't un- 
derstand Latin, it is not my fault." 

The pleas were received, and the case was laughed out 
of court. 

Patrick McFadgin found himself indicted in the cir- 
cuit court of Pickens county for indulging in sundry 



408 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Hibernian pastimes, whereby his superflux of animal and 
ardent spirits exercised themselves and his shillaly, to the 
annoyance of the good and peaceable citizens and burghers 
of the village of Pickensville. Squire Furkisson was a 
witness against him, and upon his evidence, chiefly, Mc- 
Fadgin was convicted on three several indictments for 
testing the strength of his shillaly on the craniums of as 
many citizens. 

A more serious case was now coming up against Pat, 
having its origin in his drawing and attempting to fire a 
pistol, loaded with powder and three leaden bullets, which 
pistol the said Patrick in his right hand then and there 
held, with intent one Bodley then and there to kill and 
murder contrary to the form of the statute — it being 
highly penal to murder a man in Alabama contrary to 
the form of the statute. 

To this indictment Patrick pleaded " Not guilty," and, 
the jury being in the box, the district attorney proceeded 
to call Furkisson as a witness. "With the utmost inno- 
cence, Patrick turned his face to the court and said, " Do 
I understand yer honor that Misthur Furkisson is to be a 
witness foment me agin?" The judge said dryly, it 
seemed so. " Well, thin, yer honor, I plade guilty sure, 
an' ef yer honor plaze, not because I am guilty, for I'm 
as innocent as yer honor's sucking babe at the brist — but 
jist on the account of saving Misthur Furkisson's sowl." 

Plunk et, Lord. — Lord Eedesdale was never more 
puzzled than at one of Plunket's best jeux d' 'esprit. A 
cause was argued in chancery, wherein the plaintiff, rep- 
resented by Plunket, prayed that the defendant should 
be restrained from suing him on certain bills of exchange, 
as they were nothing but kites. 

" Kites ! " exclaimed Eedesdale. " Kites, Mr. Plunket, 



BENCH AND BAR 409 

kites never could amount to the value of these securities. 
I don't understand this statement at all, Mr. Plunket." 

" It is not to be expected that you should, my lord," 
answered Plunket. " In England and in Ireland kites are 
quite different things. In England the wind raises the 
kites, but in Ireland the kites raise the wind." 

" I do not feel any better informed yet, Mr. Plunket," 
said the chancellor. 

" Well, my lord, I'll explain the thing without mention- 
ing these birds of prey," and therewith he elucidated the 
difficulty. 

An aide-de-camp of Lord Wellesley published travels 
in the east under the title of "A Personal Narrative of a 
Journey from Bagdad," somewhat after the style of "Sin- 
bad the Sailor." 

" What does he mean," said the Lord Lieutenant, " by 
a personal narrative?" 

"He means, my lord," said Plunket, "the same that 
we lawyers mean when we say that personal is the reverse 
•of real." 

Plunket, while pleading one day, observing the hour 
late, said it was his wish to proceed with the trial, if the 
jury would set. 

" Sit, sir," said the judge, correcting him, "not set; hens 
set." 

" I thank you, my lord," was the reply. 

Shortly after, the judge had occasion to observe that 
if such were the case he feared the action would not lay. 

"Lie, my lord," said Plunket, "not lay; hens lay." 

Pollock, Baron. — Some one who wished the Baron 
to resign, waited on him, hinted at his resignation, and 
suggested it for his own sake, entirely with a view to the 



410 WIT AND HUMOR. 

prolongation of his valued life, and so forth. The old 
man rose, and said with his grim, dry gravity, "Will you 
dance with me ? " The guest stood aghast as the Lord 
Chief Baron, who prided himself particularly upon his 
legs, began to caper about with a certain youth-like vivac- 
ity. Seeing his visitor stan ling surprised he capered up 
to him and said, " Well, if you won't dance with me, will 
you box with me?" And with that he squared up to 
him; and half in jest, half in earnest, fairly boxed him 
out of the room. The old Chief Baron had no more vis- 
itors anxiously inquiring after his health. 

Pollock was prone to the expression of strong general 
views, which he conveyed in a manner eminently char- 
acteristic, with an idiomatic vigor and originality almost 
amusing. " If," said he, " every man were to take advan- 
tage of every occasion to have ' the law ' of his neighbor, 
life would not be long enough for the litigation which 
would result. All flesh and blood would be turned into 
plaintiffs and defendants." 

Precedent. — " I don't like to hear people dwelling so 
much upon precedent" said Home Tooke; "it always 
shows there is something wrong in the principle." 

When the judges sneeze, the lawyers take a pinch of 

snuff. 

Mastering the lawless science of our law, — 
That codeless myriad of precedent, 
That wilderness of single instances. 

— Tennyson. 

While arguing a case in the Supreme Court, Eufu& 
Choate took a position which appeared to be equitable ; 
but the court demanded a precedent for it: 

" I will look, your honors, and endeavor to find a prece- 
dent, if you require it; though it would seem to be a pity 



BENCH AND BAR. 41 1 



Jhat the court should lose the honor of being the first to 
establish so just a rule." 

Lord Justice Komer, of England, swept away a vener- 
able precedent and established a greatly improved one in 
its place. The old one was in a case where two judges 
had delivered opposite judgments, and a third observed 
oracularly: "I agree with Brother A. for the reasons 
given by Brother B." The new one is much finer. Lord 
Justice Smith had delivered judgment dismissing an ap- 
peal. Lord Justice Collins said : " I agree — " "I also 
agree," said Eomer. "One moment," said Collins; "I 
haven't finished yet," and he proceeded to give his rea- 
sons. Then there was a solemn pause, and everybody 
looked anxiously at Eomer. Firmly, if somewhat sadly, 
he spoke: " I still agree." 

When judges are about to do an unjust or absurd ac- 
tion, they seek for a precedent, in order to justify their 
own conduct by the faults of others. 

— Sergeant Hill. 

In allusion to a quotation of precedents Lord Chatham 
protested : " 1 come not here armed at all points with 
law-cases and Acts of Parliament, with the statute books 
doubled down in dog's-ears, to defend the cause of lib- 
erty." 

William Wirt, the eloquent and distinguished advocate^ 
in the trial of a case stated a legal proposition the sound- 
ness of which was doubted by his opponent, who asked 
for his authority — citation of a precedent, with book 
and page. Wirt instantly replied in his most gorgeous 
manner: 

" Sir, I am not bound to grope my way among the ruins 
of antiquity to stumble over obsolete statutes, and delve 



412 WIT AND HUMOR 

in black-letter lore in search of a principle written in liv- 
ing letters upon the heart of every man." 

Sergeant Hill, an odd character at the bar in Mans- 
field's time, attained considerable prominence for his pro- 
found knowledge of black-letter law. His memory was 
excellent, but the arrangement of his knowledge irregu- 
lar. He had a habit of pouring out his legal treasures 
without reference to the matter in hand. He once began 
an argument in the King's Bench : 

" My Lord Mansfield and Judges, I beg your pardon." 
"Why, brother Hill, do you ask our pardon?" 
" My Lords, I have seventy-eight cases to cite." 
" Seventy-eight cases," said Lord Mansfield, " to cite! 
You can never have our pardon if you cite seventy-eight 
cases." 

After the court had given its decision upon the case 
(which was against the Sergeant's client), Lord Mansfield 
said : 

"Now, brother Hill, that the judgment is given, you 
can have no objection on account of your client to tell us 
your real opinion, and whether you don't think we are 
right. You know how much we all value your opinion 
and judgment." 

" Upon my word," was Hill's reply, " I did not think 
that there were four men in the world who could have 
given such an ill-founded judgment as you four, my lords, 
have pronounced." 

Prentice, George D. — A few bright sayings of Pren- 
tice are culled from his Prenticeana: 

" Place confers no dignity upon such a man as the new 
Missouri senator. Like a balloon, the higher he rises the 
smaller he looks." 






BENCH AND BAR. 413 

" Well, George," asked a friend of a young lawyer, " bow 
do you like your profession ? " " Alas, sir, my profession 
is much better than my practice." 

" To keep your friends, treat them kindly; to kill them, 
treat them often." 

" The persons who are supposed to have taken the most 
interest in the late financial pressure were the money 
lenders." 

" General H , finding himself unable to pay his 

debts, has taken to drink. We suppose he calls that going 
into liquidation." 

" A duel was fought in Mississippi last week by Mr. I. 
Knott and Mr. A. W. Shott. The result was — Knott 
was shot and Shott was not." 

" The editor of ' Star ' says he has never murdered 

the truth. He never gets near enough to it to do it any 
harm." 

" The editor of the speaks of his ' lying curled up 

in bed these cold mornings.' This verifies what we said 
of him some time ago, — he lies like a dog." 

Prentice was witty in a remarkable degree, and not less 
remarkable in a tenderness of heart that at times was 
truly pathetic. His lecture on temperance is an example 
of the latter : 

" There are times when the pulse lies low in the bosom, 
and beats low in the veins; when the spirit, which, ap- 
parently, knows no waking, sleeps in its house of clay, 
and the windows are shut, the doors hung in the invisible 
crape of melancholy ; when we wish the golden sunshine 
pitchy darkness, and wish to fancy clouds where no clouds 
be. . . . What shall raise the spirit? What shall 
make the heart beat music again, and the sun kiss the 



414 WIT AND HUMOR. 

eastern hills . . . with his old awakening gladness, 
and the night overflow witli moonlight, love and flowers ? 
Love itself is the greatest stimulant — the most intoxi- 
cating of all, and performs all these miracles. 

" Men have tried many things, but still they ask for 
stimulant. 

"Men try to bury the floating dead of their own souls 
in the wine-cup, but the corpse rises. "We see their faces 
in the bubbles. The intoxication of drink sets the world 
whirling again, and the pulses to playing music, and the 
thoughts galloping, but the fast clock runs down sooner, 
and an unnatural stimulant only leaves the house it filled 
with the wildest revelry, more silent, more sad, more de- 
serted. 

" There is only one stimulant that never intoxicates — 
duty. Duty puts a clear sky over every man, into which 
the skylark, happiness, always goes singing." 

Prentiss, S. S.— Prentiss, of Mississippi, died in 1850, 
at the age of forty-two. He was a great jury lawyer and 
famous as a stump speaker. None of his contemporaries, 
such as Webster, Choate, Marshall and Clay, ever spoke 
of him except in the highest praise. 

The effect of his speech in the Mississippi contested 
election case, which introduced him to Congress and the 
country, was as great upon his audience as Pinckney's 
speech on the Missouri Compromise, or Webster's reply 
to Hayne. He rose an obscure young man from the wilds 
of the Yazoo and the Big Black. He sat'down famous. 
" Nobody could equal it," said Webster, as he passed out 
of the hall of the House of Representatives. " I can never 
forget that speech," remarked Mr. Fillmore, many years 
after; "it Was certainly the most brilliant that I ever 
heard." 



BENCH AND BAR 415 

Baldwin, in his " Flush Times of Alabama and Missis- 
sippi," says of him: 

As an advocate, Prentiss attained a wider celebrity 
than as a jurist. Indeed, he was more formidable in this 
than in any other department of his profession. Before 
the Supreme or Chancery or Circuit Court, upon the law 
of the case, inferior abilities might set off, against greater 
native powers, superior application and research; or the 
precedents might overpower him; or the learning or 
judgment of the bench might come in aid of the right, 
even when more feebly defended than assailed. But 
what protection had mediocrity, or even second-rate tal- 
ent, against the influences of excitement and fascination, 
let loose upon a mercurial jury, at least as easily im- 
pressed through their passions as their reason? The 
boldness of his attacks, his iron nerve, his adroitness, his 
power of debate, the overpowering fire — broadside after 
broadside — which he poured into the assailable points 
of his adversary, his facility and plainness of illustration, 
and his talent of adapting himself to every mind and 
character he addressed, rendered him, on all debatable 
issues, next to irresistible. To give him the conclusion 
was nearly the same thing as to give him the verdict. 

Prentiss had no rival on the stump. A single dose of 
his oratory was generally enough for a competitor. On 
one occasion he was in the midst of a powerful invective 
against General Jackson. His audience was spellbound 
by his fervor. He himself seemed carried away by it. 
At this momeift a Democrat, provided with a banner on 
which was inscribed, " Hurrah for Jackson ! " came slowly 
down the centre aisle of the crowded court-house, where 
his audience was assembled. 

Prentiss allowed the intruder to come almost within 
arm's reach, when, pausing an instant as if it were a 



416 WIT AND HUMOR 

prearranged part, lie exclaimed, " In short, my country 
men, here you have the whole sum and substance of the 
Jacksonian platform and argument, ' Hurrah for Jack- 
son ! ' " The effect was electrical ; the poor fellow slunk 
away, trailing his banner after him. 

Prentiss was addressing a crowd of four thousand people 
in his state, defending the tariff, and in the course of an 
eloquent period which rose to a beautiful climax, he 
painted the thrift, the energy, the comfort, the wealth, 
the civilization of the North in glowing colors, — when 
there rose on the vision of the assembly, in the open air, 
a horseman of magnificent proportions; and just at the 
moment of hushed attention, when the voice of Prentiss 
had ceased and the applause was about to break forth, 

the horseman exclaimed, " D the North ! " The curse 

was so much in unison with the habitual feeling of a 
Mississippi audience that it quenched their enthusiasm, 
and nothing but respect for the speaker kept them from 
cheering the horseman. Prentiss turned upon his lame 
foot and said : 

" Major Moody, will you rein in that horse a moment ? " 

He assented. The orator went on : 

" Major, the horse on which you ride came from Upper 
Missouri; the saddle that surmounts him came from Tren- 
ton, N. J. ; the hat on your head came from Danbury, 
Conn. ; the boots you wear came from Lynn, Mass. ; the 
linen on your shirt is Irish, and Boston made it up ; your 
broadcloth coat is of Lowell manufacture, and was cut in 
New York; and if to-day you surrender 'what you owe 
the d North you would sit stark naked." 

In one of the hot political campaigns McNutt was the 
Democratic candidate for Governor and Prentiss the Ke- 
publican nominee. Prentiss addressed the people in nearly 



BENCH AND BAR. 417 

every county in the state ; the people, en masse, flocked 
to hear him. The Democratic nominee did not attempt 
to meet him on the stump. Prentiss' march through the 
state was over the heads of the people, hundreds follow- 
ing him from county to county in his ovation. McXutt 
was a lawyer of fine ability and Governor of the state. 
Unfortunately, like most of the young and talented of 
that day in the West, he was too much addicted to the 
intoxicating bowl. Upon the only meeting of Prentiss 
and McNutt, the latter, in his speech, urged as a reason 
for the defeat of the former his dissipated habits, which, 
he said, were rendering him useless, with all his genius, 
learning and eloquence. 

Prentiss, in reply, said : 

" My fellow-citizens, you have heard the charge against 
my morals, sagely, and, I had almost said, soberly made 
by the gentleman, the Democratic nominee for the chief 
executive office of this state: had I said this, it would 
have been what the lawyers term a misnomer. It would 
be impossible for him to do or say anything soberly, for 
he has been drunk ten years ; not yesterday, or last week,, 
in a frolic, or socially, with the good fellows, his friends, 
at the genial and generous board — but at home, and by 
himself and demijohn; not upon the rich wines of the 
Rhine or the Phone, the Saone or the Guadalquiver ; not 
with high-spirited or high-witted men, whose souls, when 
mellowed with glorious wine, leap from their lips sub- 
limated words swollen with wit, or thought brilliant and 
dazzling as the blood of the grape inspiring them — no, 
but by himself: selfish and apart from witty men or en- 
nobling spirits, in the secret seclusion of a dirty little 
back-room, and on corn- whisky ! — these only, commun- 
ing in affectionate brotherhood, the son of Yirginia and 
the spirits of old Kentucky! Why, fellow-citizens, as 
27 



418 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the Governor of the state he refused to sign the gallon- 
law until he had tested, by experiment, that a gallon 
would do him all day ! 

" Now I will admit, fellow-citizens, that sometimes, 
when in the enjoyment of social communion with gentle- 
men, I am made merry with these, and the rich wines of 
glorious France. It is then I enjoy the romance of life. 
Imagination stimulated with the juice of the grape gave 
to the world the Song of Solomon, and the Psalms of 
that old poet of the Lord — glorious old David. 

"The immortal verse of wandering old Homer, the 
blind son of Scio's isle, was the inspiration of Samian 
wine; and gcod old Noah, too, would have sung some 
good and merry song, from the inspiration of the juice 
of the vine he planted, but having to wait so long, his 
thirst, like the Democratic nominee's here, became so great 
that he was tempted to drink too deeply, and got too 
drunk to sing; and this, I fancy, is the true reason why 
this distinguished gentleman never sings. 

" Perhaps there is no music in his soul. The glug — 
glug — glug of his jug, as he tilts and pours from its re- 
luctant mouth the corn-juice so loved of his soul, is all the 
music dear to his ear, unless it be the same glug — glug — 
glug as it disappears down his rapacious throat. 

"Now, fellow-citizens, during this ardent campaign, 
which has been so fatiguing, I have only been drunk once. 
Over in Simpson county I was compelled to sleep in the 
same bed with this distinguished nominee — this delight 
of the Democracy — this wonderful exponent of the prin- 
ciples and practices of the unwashed Democracy — and in 
the morning I found myself drunk on corn-whisky; I 
had lain too close to this soaked mass of Democracy, and 
was drunk from absorption." 

This was more than the Governor could stand, and 



BENCH AND BAR. 419 

amidst the shouts and laughter of the assembled multi- 
tude, he left the stand, and declined to meet again, before 
the people, the young Ajax-Telamon of the Whig party. 

Punctuation. — There is a legend of a Dublin crim- 
inal trial wherein the prisoner's fate hung upon a ques- 
tion of punctuation. He was accused of robbery. The 
principal evidence against him was a confession alleged 
to have been made by him and taken down in writing by 
a police officer. And this was the incriminating passage : 

" Mangan said he never robbed but twice said it was 
Crawford." 

The officer explained that the meaning he attached to 
it was : 

" Mangan said he never robbed but twice. Said it was 
Crawford." 

" Nay," cried Mr. O'Gorman, the prisoner's counsel, after 
a careful examination of the document, this is the fair and 
obvious reading: 

" Mangan said he never robbed ; but twice said it was 
Crawford." 

This explanation had its effect on the jury and the ac- 
cused was acquitted. 

The misplacement of a comma cost the government 
about two millions of dollars. The blunder occurred in a 
tariff bill more than twenty years ago. There was a sec- 
tion enumerating what articles should be admitted free 
of duty. Among the many articles specified were " all 
foreign fruit-plants," etc., meaning plants for transplant- 
ing, propagation or experiment. The enrolling clerk, a 
young attorney, in copying the bill, accidentally changed 
the hyphen in the compound word " fruit-plants " to a 
comma, making it read " All foreign fruit, plants," etc. 
The consequence was that for a year, until Congress could 



420 WIT AND HUMOR. 

remedy the blunder, all oranges, lemons, bananas, grapes, 
and other foreign fruits were admitted free of duty. 

A Prussian school inspector appeared at the office of 
the burgomaster of a city to ask him to accompany him 
on a tour of inspection through the schools. The burgo- 
master was out of sorts, and was heard to mutter to him- 
self: 

"What is this donkey here again for?" 

The inspector said nothing, but waited his time, and 
with the unwilling burgomaster set out on his tour. At 
the first school he announced his wish to see how well 
punctuation was taught. 

"Oh, never mind that," grumbled the burgomaster, 
" we don't care for commas and such trifles." 

But the inspector sent a boy to the blackboard and or- 
dered him to write: 

" The burgomaster of E. says, the inspector is a donkey" 

Then he ordered him to transpose the comma, placing 
it after E,., and insert another one after inspector, and 
the boy wrote: 

" The burgomaster of R., says the inspector, is a donkey" 

It is probable that the refractory official gained a new 
idea of the value of commas and such trifles. 

Quarles, J. V. — United States Senator Quarles, of 
Wisconsin, of rare ability as a lawyer — quiet, shrewd, 
tactful — possesses a fine sense of the humorous. A single 
illustration of this sense of humor is related in the story 
of a friend : 

" How in the world Joe Quarles ever got to the front 
will be a mystery to some people who do not understand 
how a man can succeed unless he travels with a brass 
band. Joe would sit in a law-suit all day with his eyes 
shut, and apparently asleep. The other fellow would 



BENCH AND BAR. 421 

make the noise, until finally Joe would trap him at the 
turn of the case and win by a single question. When all 
was over you would hear about three days after of a lot 
of things that Quarles had been doing. I don't know 
how he will talk in the Senate, but before a jury he talked 
just as he would in a country store on a rainy day. And 
he always said something in a quiet way. You didn't 
seem to think of it until he was gone. Then you went 
around and told everybody you knew what Joe Quarles 
said. 

" I was at school with Joe at Racine College. There 
wasn't the same reason for me to study that there was for 
Joe. My father was rich, and I had a fool notion that I 
didn't have to study. One day, after I had been assigned 
to write an essay, I went to Quarles and told him I had 
to go fishing, and asked him if he would write my essay 
for me. He consented. Then he asked me which I liked 
best, prose or poetry. It struck me that a poetical essay 
would be a novelty, and I told him to grind out one in 
verse, and that I would give him some of the fish. When 
I returned he asked for the fish and got it, and then he 
said: 'There's your essay.' The next day I stood up be- 
fore the class and read with innocence the verse dialogue 
beginning : 

"'Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day,' and so forth. 
I read the whole of it while the professor and class gig- 
gled. When I resumed my seat the professor asked me if 
I wished to be understood as the author of the paper, 
and I said of course. He said that if I was right Tom 
Campbell was a pirate. 

" That evening I met Quarles and asked him who Tom 
Campbell was. 

" < Which Tom ? ' he asked. 

" I said the one who was a pirate. Joe replied that 



422 WIT AND HUMOR 

that was the one he didn't know. That essay cost my 
guv'nor $100. The class was hungry. In after years 
Quarles managed my guv'nor's estate, and when I asked 
him what I owed him he answered: 

" ' Nothing. When are you going fishin' again ? ' " 

RandoliDh, John. — Eandolph, of Virginia, was noted 
for his wit, eloquence and bitterness of speech. That his 
nature was not all rough is shown by his will, providing 
for the emancipation of his slaves, numbering more than 
three hundred, and by the following story: 

" I once asked John Eandolph," says John Quincy 
Adams, " who was the greatest orator he had ever heard. 
The reply was startling, from its unexpectedness. 'The 
greatest orator I ever heard,' said Eandolph, ' was a 
woman. She was a slave. She was a mother, and her 
rostrum was the auction block.' He then rose and imi- 
tated with thrilling pathos the tones with which this 
woman had appealed to the sympathy and justice of the 
bystanders. 'There was eloquence!' he said. 'I have 
heard no man speak like that. It was overpowering ! ' ' 

Judge Baldwin finely observes : "Eandolph's wit was 
much more than humor. It was a refined, wire-edged 
and diamond-pointed common sense; a sharp and shrewd 
sagacity, which, while it had the edge of sarcasm, had 
also the force of argument. Eandolph had the rare fac- 
ulty of interpreting for the crowd; of translating in bet- 
ter and apter language the thoughts passing in the mind 
of the hearer, who was delighted to find that Eandolph 
was only thinking his thoughts. His verbal aptness was 
astonishing. When anything was to be characterized by 
an epithet, he at once characterized it by a word or phrase 
so striking and pat that it created the surprise and pleas- 
ure which are the most marked effects of wit. He had 



BENCH AND BAR. 423 

the same aptness of quotation. No man made the re- 
sources of others more subservient to his own purposes. 
He did not merely appropriate. He gave a new value to 
the quoted sentence. There was as much genius in the 
selection and application as in the conception and expres- 
sion of the idea. His ingenuity was very great. He had 
the faculty of seeing remote analogies and correspond- 
ences, and of accumulating around a dry, isolated and un- 
inviting topic a multitude of images, facts, suggestions 
and illustrations. His finely-toned and penetrative intel- 
lect possessed an acumen, a perspicuity which was as 
quick and vivid as lightning. His mind, as by an instinct- 
ive insight, darted at once upon the core of the subject, 
and sprang, with an electric leap, upon the conclusion. 
He started where most reasoners end." 

Eandolph had a short, small body, perched upon high, 
crane legs, so that when he stood up you did not know 
where he was to end ; yet he commanded the attention 
of Congress, in spite of his gaunt figure and his ear-split- 
ting scream. Bos well, who heard him speak at York in 
1784, wrote a friend: 

" I saw what soemed a mere shrimp mount upon the 
table; but as I listened, he grew and grew until the 
shrimp became a whale." 

It was readiness which made Eandolph so terrible in 
retort. No hyperbole of contempt or scorn could be 
launched against him but he could overtop it with some- 
thing more scornful and contemptuous. Opposition only 
maddened him into more bitterness. 

" Isn't it a shame, Mr. President," said he one day in 
the Senate, " that noble bull-dogs of the administration 
should be wasting their precious time in worrying the 
rats of the opposition ? " 



421 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Immediately the Senate was in an uproar, and he was 
clamorously called to order. The presiding officer, how- 
ever, sustained him; and, pointing his long finger at his 
opponents, Randolph screamed out: 

" Eats, did I say ? — mice, mice ! " 

" I never give the wall to a blackguard," said a polit- 
ical opponent to Randolph. 

" I always do," said Randolph, as he took the gutter 
side. 

"When Randolph was a member of Congress he boarded 
in Georgetown, and generally rode over to the capitol, 
though he sometimes walked. On a keen, frosty morn- 
ing, while walking across the Rock Creek bridge, he 
caught up to a gentleman, who, having a speaking ac- 
quaintance with Randolph, proceeded over the bridge 
with him. Randolph had very long legs, and even in his 
ordinary gait was a fast walker. "With some difficulty 
the gentleman kept up with him, and, saluting, said: 

" Good morning, Mr. Randolph ; you are walking fast 
this morning." 

"Yes, sir, and I can walk still faster; " which he at 
once did, leaving the gentleman far behind to ruminate 
on the politeness of statesmen. 

Randolph, while making many others the victims of his 
ill-natured sarcasm, occasionally found himself the suf- 
ferer. Traveling through a part of Virginia strange to 
him, he stopped for the night at an inn near the forks of 
the road. The innkeeper was a gentleman by birth, and, 
learning who his distinguished guest was, sought to draw 
him into conversation during the evening, but failed. In 
the morning Randolph paid his bill. The landlord, still 
anxious for some conversation, said : 

" "Which way are you traveling, Mr. Randolph ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 425 

" Sir ? " rejoined Eandolph, surlily. 

"I asked which way are you traveling?" 

" Have I paid you nry bill ? " 

" Yes." 

" Do I owe you anything ? " 

"No." 

"Well, I am going just where I please; do you under- 
stand ? " 

" Yes, I understand." 

Eandolph drove off, leaving the landlord somewhat 
flurried by his ill-temper; but in a few moments one of 
the servants came back to inquire which one of the forks 
of the road the traveler should take. Randolph was yet 
within hearing-distance, and the landlord shouted to him 
at the top of his voice: 

" Mr. Randolph, you don't owe me one cent ; just take 
which road you please." 

The story of the duel between Henry Clay and Ran- 
dolph is familiar to most persons; not so their subsequent 
reconciliation, and the manner of its accomplishment. It 
took place many years after the hostile meeting. In re- 
gard to it Clay wrote to a friend, in the year preceding 
Randolph's death: "You ask how amity was restored be- 
tween Mr. Randolph and me. There was no explanation, 
no intervention. Observing him in the Senate one night, 
looking as if he was not long for this world, and being 
myself engaged in a work of peace, with corresponding 
feelings, I shook hands with him. The salutation was 
cordial on both sides. I afterward left my card at his 
lodgings, where I understood he had been confined by 
sickness." 

In the last public speech that Randolph made, after 
dwelling on the threatening danger of disunion, he is re- 
ported to have said : " There is one man, and one man 



426 WIT AND HUMOR. 

only, who can save the Union — that is Henry Clay. I 
know he has the power; I believe he will be found to 
have the patriotism and firmness equal to the occasion." 
The cause of the duel between these distinguished men 
was the following insulting language used by Randolph 
toward Clay in a session of the Senate in 1825: "This 
man — (mankind, I crave your pardon) — this worm — 
(little animals, forgive this insult) — was spit out of the 
womb of weakness — was raised to a higher life than he 
was born to, for he was raised to the society of black- 
guards. Some fortune — kind to him — cruel to us — has 
tossed him to the secretaryship of the state. Contempt 
has the property of descending, but she stoops far short 
of him. She would die before she would reach him ; he 
dwells below her fall. I would hate him if I did not de- 
spise him. It is not what he is, but where he is, that puts 
my thoughts in action. This alphabet which writes the 
name of Thersites, of blackguard, of squalidit}^, refuses 
her letters for him. That mind which thinks on what it 
cannot express can scarcely think on him. A hyperbole 
for meanness would be an ellipsis for Clay." 

Once after Eandolph had been speaking in Congress,, 
several members rose in succession and attacked him. 
His reply was as witty as it was prompt. " Sir," said he 
to the speaker, " I am in the condition of old Lear — 

The little dogs and all, 

Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, 

See — they bark at me." 

Receipt. — The judgment of Dunnigan against O'Fla- 
herty had been paid in open court, but the defendant 
still lingered with a dissatisfied expression on his face. 
Noticing this, the judge asked : 

" What are you waiting for, Mr. O'Flaherty ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 427 

" Oi'm waitin' for me resate." 

"But the judgment has beeu marked satisfied, and that 
is much better than a receipt." 

" Oi want a resate," obstinately repeated O'Flaherty. 

" See here, O'Flaherty, what do you mean by this ob- 
stinacy?" demanded the judge. 

" Yer 'anner an' mesilf '11 be dyin' some of these days," 
explained O'Flaherty, " an' whin oi come to the gate Saint 
Pether '11 be afther axin', 'Did yez pay thot Dunnigan?' 
An' oi'll say, ' Yes, oi did thot.' An' Saint Pether'U say, 
' Where's the resate ? ' An' oi'll say, ' Ut's sathisfied on 
the record, an' oi have no resate.' An' thin Saint Pether 
'11 say : ' Go an' get a resate. Yez can't get in here widout 
wan.' An', yer 'anner, ut's all over purgathory oi'll have 
to be afther trampin' to find yer 'anner an' git a resate." 

Redesdale, Lord.—" Eedesdale," writes Barrington, 
in his Personal Sketches, " was much (though unintention- 
ally) annoyed by Mr. Toler (Lord Norbury) at one of the 
first dinners he gave as Lord Chancellor of Ireland to the 
judges and king's counsel. Having heard that the mem- 
bers of the Irish bar were considered extremely witty, 
and being desirous of adapting himself to their habits, his 
lordship got together some of the best bar remarks to 
repeat to his company as occasion might offer, and, if he 
could not be humorous, determined at least to be enter- 
taining. 

" The first of his lordship's observations after dinner 
was the telling us that he had been a Welsh judge, and 
had found great difficulty in pronouncing the double 
consonants in the Welsh proper names. 'After much 
trial,' continued his lordship, ' I found that the difficulty 
was mastered by moving the tongue alternately from one 
dog-tooth to the other.' Toler seemed quite delighted 



428 WIT AND HUMOR 

with this discovery, and requested to know his lordship's 
dentist, as he had lost one of his dog-teeth, and would 
immediately get another in place of it. This went off 
flatly enough, no laugh being gained on either side. Lord 
Eedesdale's next remark was that when he was a lad 
cock-fighting was the fashion, and that both ladies and 
gentlemen went full dressed to the cockpit, the ladies 
being in hoops. ' I see now, my lord,' said Toler, ' it was 
then that the term " cock-a-hoop " was invented.' A gen- 
eral laugh now burst forth which rather discomposed the 
learned chancellor. He sat for a while silent until skat- 
ing became a subject of conversation, when his lordship 
rallied, and, with an air of triumph, said that in his boy- 
hood all danger was avoided, for before they began to 
skate they always put down bladders under their arms, 
and so if the ice happened to break they were buoyant 
and secure. ' Ay, my lord,' said Toler, ' that's what we 
call blatheram skate (an Irish vulgar idiom for * nonsense ') 
in Ireland.' 

" His lordship did not understand this sort of thing at 
all, and, though extremely courteous, seemed to wish us 
all to our respective homes. Having failed with Toler, 
in order to say a civil thing or two, he addressed himself 
to Garret O'Farrell, a jolly Irish barrister, who always 
carried a parcel of coarse national humors about with 
him — a broad, squat, ruddy-faced fellow, with a great 
aquiline nose and a humorous eye. Independent in mind, 
he generally said whatever was uppermost. ' Mr. Garret 
O'Farrell,' said the chancellor, solemnly, ' I believe your 
name and family were very respectable and numerous in 
County Wicklow; I think I was introduced to several of 
them during my late tour there/ ' Yes, my lord,' said 
O'Farrell, ' we were very numerous, but so many of us 
have been lately hanged for sheep-stealing that the name 
is getting rather scarce in that county.' 



BENCH AND BAR. 429 

" The chancellor said no more, and, so far as respect 
for a new chancellor admitted, we got into our line of 
conversation without his assistance. Kedesdale began -by 
degrees to understand some jokes a few minutes after 
they were uttered, and at the breaking-up his impression 
was that we were a pleasant though not a very compre- 
hensible race." 

Reed, Thomas B. — Eeed, of Maine, famous as law- 
yer and statesman, possesses a fanciful humor and a wit 
of rare brightness. Despising cant, hypocrisy and sham, 
he has unflinchingly stood for right and justice. His 
counting of a quorum in the Fifty-first Congress is a bril- 
liant setting to his fame. On that occasion, McCreary, 
of Kentucky, in the midst of a mob-like demonstration, 
shouted on the Democratic side: 

" I deny your right, Mr. Speaker, to count me as pres- 
ent." 

Reed like a shot replied : 

" The Chair is merely making a statement of the fact 
that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it ? " 

This crushing reply of common sense to the flimsy rea- 
son of antiquated custom was unanswerable. 

In the gem of magazines — Ainslee's — Mr. L. A. Cool- 
idge says of Eeed: 

With a single exception, Eeed is the only statesman 
with a profound and abounding gift of humor and an 
irrepressible propensity for epigram who has ever ad- 
vanced so far in political favor in the United States. 
There have been times when it was doubtful whether he 
was better known for his statesmanship and his force of 
will and intellect, or for the wit and sarcasm which illu- 
minate almost everything he says. In one with less pro- 
found political sense this would be fatal to high political 



430 WIT AND HUMOR. 

preferment; but with Reed, as with Franklin, the play 
of fanciful humor goes hand in hand with power of rea- 
son and helps to emphasize and popularize it. Many of 
his sayings 'have become classic. 

When was ever a great truth more compactly and wit- 
tily put than when Reed defined a statesman as a " suc- 
cessful politician who is dead ? " 

Who ever gained a standing in the House as an effect- 
ive debater more justly than Reed when in the course of 
his maiden speech he completed the demolition of the 
argument of a preceding speaker with the famous sen- 
tence, "And now, having embalmed that fly in the liquid 
amber of my remarks, I will proceed ? " 

A book might be compiled consisting entirely of the 
wise and witty sayings of Reed. There is a well-known 
fling at Springer of Illinois, who, with great impressive- 
ness, announced in a debate in the House that he would 
rather be right than President, and Reed, standing in the 
middle aisle, apparently paying no attention to what was 
going on, flashed out, "The gentleman need not be 
alarmed, he will never be either." There is that other 
remark about Springer, that "he never opened his mouth 
without substracting from the sum of human knowledge." 
And there is the bitter comment on President Harrison, 
explaining why he had no reason to favor the Harrison 
administration, " So far as I know, I have but two ene- 
mies in the state of Maine. One of them the President 
appointed collector at Portland, the other he pardoned 
out of the penitentiary." 

One of Reed's most effective weapons in debate, wherein 
for years he has been easily master of the House, has been 
his swift and unerring wit, and yet his wit is so subordi- 
nated to the greater ends he has in view that it is remem- 
bered only for the light it sheds upon his argument. 



BENCH AND BAR 431 

On one occasion a new member, being asked to deliver 
a eulogy upon a deceased colleague whom he had never 
known, sought out the Speaker in great trepidation of 
mind. 

"Mr. Speaker," he said, "I did not know X ; you 

did. Please tell me what I had better say about him." 

" Say," drawled Eeed, the humorous expression so char- 
acteristic of him sparkling in his eyes, " say anything ex- 
cept the truth." 

At the Underwriters' dinner given in his honor in New 
York, Eeed was speaking of the Kaiser's latest speech, in 
which he used the personal pronoun " I " ten times in ten 
lines. After quoting the speech, Eeed remarked dryly: 
"And then he went out and ordered a new crown nine- 
teen feet in diameter." 

At a dinner given by Mr. Kerens, of St. Louis, Eeed, 
in relating some incidents in his early career at the bar, 
said: "How well I remember the first fee I received: 
twenty-five dollars in coin, and how proud I was as I 
jingled it in my pocket. I received it for defending a 
Mexican charged with murder. 

" I think, as I look back on that day when I jingled 
that gold money in my pocket, my very own money, 
and the first that I ever earned at law, that it was the 
proudest and happiest moment of my life." 

There was a silence around the table, in order to give 
Eeed a few moments of reverie. Then the silence was 
broken abruptly by Kerens: 

" But you haven't told us what became of the Mexican 
whose life you were defending." 

" Oh, that," said Eeed, with a drawl, " is another story." 

During the Fifty-first Congress, when Eeed was Speaker 
and Czar of the House of Eepresentatives, a gentleman 



432 WIT AND HUMOR. 

and his bright little son wero in the gallery of the 
House. 

" Who are all those men down there ? " asked the little 
fellow. 

" Those are the speakers of the House of Representa- 
tives, my son." 

" And who is that big stout man in the chair under 
the American flag ? " 

"That is the House of Representatives." 

Repartee and Retort, Attorneys'. — Notable ex- 
amples of repartee and retort are found in the annals of the 
bar. A barrister, noticing that the court had gone asleep, 
stopped short in the middle of his speech. The sudden 
silence awoke the judges, and the lawyer gravely re- 
sumed: 

"As I remarked yesterday, my lords — " 
The puzzled judges stared at each other as though they 
half believed they had been asleep since the previous day. 

Rufus A. Lockwood — an erratic genius — was a shin- 
ing light of rarest brilliancy in the early mining days 
of California. During ;he trial of an important case, in- 
volving water-lot titles in San Francisco, having asserted 
as a legal proposition that under certain conditions an 
easement might be extinguished by change of the fee, 
Isaac E. Holmes, one of the opposing counsel, interrupted 
him: 

"Do you state that as law, Mr. Lockwood?" 

" Yes, I state it as law, and I have tried and gained an 
important case upon that principle." 

Holmes retorted : " That case has not been reported, I 
fancy. It is not in the books, is it ? It is Hoosier law, 
I presume ? " 

" No, sir, the case is not in the books which the gentle- 



BENCH AND BAR. 433 

man has read. It was tried before an Indiana court, at 
an Indiana bar — a court and bar on which the gentle- 
man's transcendent ability would reflect no credit." 

Justice Wills was in the habit of interrupting counsel. 
A lawyer who was thus annoyed said to him: 

" Your lordship is even a greater man than your father. 
The Chief Baron used to understand me after I had done, 
but your lordship understands me before I begin." 

Hon. George F. Hoar's wit is finely shown in the fol- 
lowing illustration : A certain senator (call him Bagley) 
was a constant talker, and talked so much that he did not 
say anything. Someone remarked to Hoar that he did 
not know why Bagley talked so much, to which Hoar re- 
plied : 

" Bagley talks to rest his mind." 

The prosecuting attorney of a Missouri county and a 
young man noted for his persistence were engaged in the 
preliminary hearing of a criminal case before a justice of 
the peace. The young attorney asked many irrelevant 
and incompetent questions, and, when the prosecuting at- 
torney would object, would always say: 

" Your honor, before you pass on that objection I want 
to argue it." 

Finally, the young man having asked the same ques- 
tion the seventh time against the prosecuting attorney's 
objection, the prosecutor, losing his patience, said in a 
loud aside: 

" , are you never going to get over being a con- 
founded fool ? '-' 

With his persistent force of habit the young attorney 
jumped up and remarked : 

" Your honor, before you pass on that I want to argue 
it." 

28 



434 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Judge Clayton was an honest man, but not a profound 
lawyer. Soon after he Avas raised to the Irish bench he 
happened to dine in company with Counselor Harwood, 
celebrated for his fine brogue, his humor and his legal 
knowledge. Clayton began to make some observations 
on the laws of Ireland: 

"In my country (England) the laws are numerous, but 
then one is always found to be a key to the other. In 
Ireland it is just the contrary; your laws so perpetually 
clash with one another, and are so very contradictory, 
that I protest 1 donH understand them." 

" Truly, my lord," cried Harwood, " that is what we all 



Sergeant K , having made two or three mistakes 

while conducting a cause, petulantly exclaimed: " I seem 
to be inoculated with dullness to-day." 

" Inoculated ? " said Erskine, " I thought you had it in 
the natural way." 

Attorney Crowle, who had acted as counsel for Sir 
George Yendepeet in an election scrutiny in 1751, was 
charged with having wilfully protracted the scrutiny, and 
with showing contempt to the House by calling its orders 
brutum fulmen. He was brought before the bar of the 
House, and was reprimanded on his knees by the Speaker. 
As he arose he wiped his knees with his handkerchief, 
and coolly said "it was the dirtiest house he had ever 
been in." Walpole, in his Memories of George II, vouches 
for the truth of this story. "While on a circuit Crowle 
was asked if the judge was not just behind. He replied: 
" I don't know ; but he never was just before. 

A lawyer was cross-examining a virago while her hus- 
band sat beside her, sheepishly listening. The lawyer was 



BENCH AND BAR. 435 

pressing a question urgently, when she said, with fire 
flashing from her eyes: 

" You needn't think to catch me? 

" Madame, I have not the slightest desire to catch you, 
and your husbands looks as if he was sorry he did." 

One of the witty and brilliant men at the Philadelphia 
bar was the late George W. Barton, who once occupied 
a seat on the bench. Trying a case before a judge chiefly 
remarkable for obtuseness, he took occasion to say that 
he had often seen a great ass in judicial robes. 

" You speak from experience ? " was the angry retort. 

" Not at all," replied Barton, " I am speaking directly 
from observation." 

George Bennett, crown prosecutor on the Munster cir- 
cuit, raised a laugh at a medical witness, in a case of 
death, by his interrogation : 

" Well, doctor, you attended the deceased ? " 

"Yes." 

" And he died accordingly ? " 

Lord Young, of the Court of Session, Scotland, was a 
very impatient judge. In a civil case being tried before 
him, Mr. Gloag, an eminent advocate, appeared for the 
prisoner, and proceeded to lay the evidence before the 
court. The first witness was called, and a few prelimi- 
nary questions were put and answered without interrup- 
tion. Suddenly the judge roused himself and took the 
examination-in-chief into his own hands. Gloag, who 
had a lively and proper sense of his own importance, 
courteously endeavored to assert his rights, but the ju- 
dicial examiner remained master of the field. When he 
had extracted by a number of skillful questions every- 
thing that the witness had to say, Lord Young looked 



436 WIT AND HUMOF. 

down to the advocate with a complacent smile. Gloag 
had resumed his seat, and made no motion to rise. 

" Now, then, Mr. Gloag," interjected the judge, sharply, 
"let us get on." 

" I am waiting for your lordship to call the next wit- 
ness." 

A wit was once arguing a case before an appellate 
court of New York, the chief justice of which was re- 
puted to be a dabbler in stocks on margins. The lawyer 
conceived that his argument was not attentively listened 
to, and when he closed he walked out of court, mutter- 
ing audibly: 

"I'll never argue another cause here until there's a 
bull market." 

An Irish counselor, explaining the loss of a cause he 
had tried before three judges — one of eminent judicial 
learning, the other two light-weights — said: 

" How could I help losing it with a hundred judges 
on the bench ? " 

" A hundred ! " exclaimed a friend. 

"Yes, a hundred — one and two ciphers." 

A bright lawyer was seated with a group of friends, 
discussing in a desultory way the leading topics of the 
day. One of the parties pers'^ted in monopolizing more 
than his share of the conversation, and his views did not 
at all accord with those of the lawyer. As the men sep- 
arated, one of them said to the lawyer: 

"That knows a good deal, doesn't he?" 

"Yes, he knows entirely too much for one man; he 
ought to be incorporated." 

As a young lawyer in his early professional career at 
Portland, Maine, Thomas B. Reed displayed the same 
qualities of ability and aggressiveness which have been 



BENCH AND BAR. 437 

characteristic of his political life. One of the strongest 
men at the Portland bar at the time was A. A. Strout. 

Before beginning a trial it was Strout's habit to inquire 
of every juror as to the state of his health, and impress 
each with the idea that the lawyer was solicitous of that 
juror's personal welfare. 

Keed and Strout were constantly antagonizing each 
other, though they were very good friends. In nearly 
every case of importance, Strout and Eeed were on oppo- 
site sides. 

It was annoying, indeed, for the suave Strout to hear 
Reed drawl out before the opening of a case : 

" Well, your honor, brother Strout having finished his 
morning task of shaking hands with the jury, we may 
now, I hope, proceed with the business of the court." 

When the late Judge Turner, of the Supreme Court of 
Vermont, was practicing at the bar, he happened, while 
arguing a question of some difficulty, to illustrate a point 
in his case by pretty free use of the vocabulary of the 
card-table. The presiding judge abruptly inquired what 
he meant by addressing such language to the court. 

" I meant, your honor, to be understood." 

On another occasion a judge, vened with the difficulty 
or irritated by the insignificance of a cause which Turner 
was conducting, cried out: 

" Sir, why do you bring such a case as this into court ? " 
" Because, your honor, we don't choose that honest men 
should have anything to do with it." 

A pompous Chicago lawyer, in the midst of his argu- 
ment, remarked : " Gentlemen of the jury, I once sat on 
the bench in Iowa." " Where was the judge ? " inquired 
the opposing attorney, and the argument of the pompous 
gentleman went to pieces right there. 



4:38 WIT AND HUMOR 

Counselor Plunket's reply to a testy and irritable judge, 
who threatened to fine him a hundred pounds if he did 
not stop coughing: " I'll give your lordship two hundred 
if you can stop it for me." 

Repartee and Retort, Judges'.— When the bench 

swings a sharp blade we join with delight in the cutting. 
Even the tipstan laughs immoderately and forgets to cry 
" Silence ! " 

Men who have worn the judicial ermine generally have 
certain privileges in court that the struggling young law- 
yer would make any sacrifice to obtain. A newly ad- 
mitted member of the bar made a suggestive remark to 
ex- Judge Curtis of New York about this, and the old 
gentleman became very angry. When he gets mad, he 
lets himself loose. He did so on this occasion, but wound 
up with: 

" I am a fool ! I am the biggest fool on earth ! " 

The youngster attempted to soothe him with the re- 
mark: 

" Judge, all men are fools at times. I have been a fool 
myself." 

The enraged old lawyer glared at him. " You a fool ? " 
he sneered. 

" Yes, and a bigger fool than you, judge." 

This caused the judge to tear the little hair left upon 
his venerable head. "I deny it, sir; it's a lie! You 
could never be a bigger fool than 1. You haven't the 
capacity, sir ; not the capacity ! " 

The late Judge Test, of Indiana, was presiding at an 
important trial at Lafayette. Most of the leading attor- 
neys at the bar were in the case and were having a good 
deal of trouble in securing a jury. A German on the 



BENCH AND BAR. 439 

panel had been accepted. He desired to be released and 
appealed to the judge to let him off, on the ground, "I 
no understand good English." 

"Tut, tut!" said the judge; "that is no excuse. You 
will not hear any good English during this trial." 

In a case concerning the limits of certain land, the 
counsel on one side remarked, with exclamatory empha- 
sis, " We lie on this side, my lord ; " and the counsel on 
the other side interposed with equal vehemence, " We lie 
on this side, my lord." The lord chancellor dryly ob- 
served: "If you lie on both sides, whom am I to be- 
lieve?" 

Bompos was earnest, noisy, and often confused in his 
arguments. 

" Is Bompos a sound lawyer ? " said a friend to Chief 
Justice Tindal. 

" All sound," replied his honor. 

Justice Page, a well-known hanging judge, being asked 
after his health as he was coming out of the criminal 
court, answered : 

" Pretty well; you see I just keep hanging on — hang- 
ing on." 

A story is told of one of the judges of the High Court 
of England and a well-known barrister. During the hear- 
ing of a case the judge left his seat to look for a law-book, 
and for a few minutes was hidden by the screen. Just as 
he disappeared from view the barrister hurried into court, 
and, seeing the vacant chair, remarked in a loud tone: 

"What — is the old fool gone to luncheon ?" 

To his chagrin, the judge popped his head round the 
screen and replied : 

" No, he has not gone yet." 



440 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Some time before 1870, a gentleman, in the midst of a 
squabble at a place of public entertainment in Vienna, ex- 
claimed : 

" Nonsense ! the Emperor is an ass." 

He was taken into custody, and brought before the 
"beak," who said to him: 

" The witnesses have clearly proved that you called the 
Emperor an ass. Have you anything to say in your de- 
fence ? " 

" Certainly. I meant the Emperor Napoleon." 

"That is an idle subterfuge! Everybody knows that 
Napoleon is an intelligent man. We know quite well 
you meant His Majesty, the Emperor of Austria." 

A young attorney was making a long, noisy argument 
before Judge Stein, of Chicago. The judge was visibly 
bored, and spectators watched curiously for an outburst. 
But the lawyer did not see the ever-increasing signs of 
displeasure. 

" There can be no two sides to this case ! " shouted the 
attorney. " Before I am through I intend — " 

" You're through now," suddenly exclaimed the judge, 
rising and waiving the speaker to his seat with a dark 
frown. And there the case ended. 

Justice Dillarcl, of the Supreme Court of North Caro- 
lina, is an example of personal independence. Judge 
Kerr, seeing Dillard in a second-class car, called out: 

" How comes it a man of your cloth is caught in a sec- 
ond-class car ? " 

" Because there is no third-class." 

An episode in the professional career of an eminent 
jurist of Pennsylvania, late a judge of the Supreme Court, 
deserves to be rescued from oblivion. Soon after his ad- 
mission to the bar, he had occasion to go to Williamsport 



BENCH AND BAR. 441 

to argue his first case. As he was pacing the deck of the 
canal-boat on which he was journeying, he encountered 
a group of three substantial, rustic-looking persons, who 
were deeply engaged in discussing the merits of an im- 
portant law-suit which had recently been tried. Fresh 
from the study of Blackstone, and believing himself to 
be the embodiment of legal learning and the incarnation 
of judicial science, he joined the group, and straightway 
proceeded to enlighten the party as to the law bearing 
on the case. The opinions which had been advanced he 
dogmatically pronounced to be erroneous, and contrary 
to law, reason and precedent. His auditors listened with 
profound attention until he had finished his harangue, 
when one of them quietly informed the speaker that, 
from his discourse, it was evident he was ignorant of 
every principle of law — civil, common and statute, writ- 
ten or unwritten. A second added that he knew nothing 
of the rules of logic, as was apparent from his defective 
style of reasoning. The third listener stated it as his 
conviction that the intruder was also destitute of common 
sense. Exasperated by such uncomplimentary remarks, 
the legal aspirant abruptly left the group, and resumed 
his promenade on the deck of the boat. Chancing to 
meet the skipper, he inquired if he knew those three old 
chaps who were talking together; adding, with consid- 
erable asperity, that they were the most stupid set of 
blockheads that ever lived. 

"Those three old chaps, Mr. K ," responded the 

ancient mariner, " are the judges of the Supreme Court, 
on their way to Williamsport, where the court opens to- 
morrow." 

Mr. K did not make his debut in the Supreme Court 

at that session, but postponed his appearance to a more 
convenient season. 



442 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Justice Nightman remarked to a prosy advocate, dur- 
ing a long and weary argument: 

"Mr. , you have stated that before, but you may 

have forgotten it; it was a very long time ago." 

Justice Day, in the Queen's Beach Division, had a case 
before him of some duration and many technicalities. 
Towards the conclusion of a long speech, counsel said, 
and the saying may be taken as a specimen of what pre- 
ceded it: 

" Then, n^ lord, comes the question of bags ; they might 
have been full bags or half-full bags; or, again, my lord, 
they might have been empty bags." 

" Or," interrupted the sorely tried judge, " they might 
have been wind bags." 

An incident illustrates the gruff nature of s^me of our 
judges. 

" A pleasant day, judge," said a courteous member of 
the bar. 

No reply. 

"A very pleasant day," repeated the attorney. 

" Well, do you want to argue it ? " snapped the judge. 

Judge Bumblethorpe had been trespassing over a clover- 
field, and escaped with his life from a mad charge of a 
bull by a swift run and a wild somersault over a fence. 
And then it was the judge who was infuriated. From 
the safe side of the fence he stormed and raged at the 
bull, and, seeing a farm house not far away, he stalked 
over to it. The farmer was choring around the barn 
when the judge rushed up to him. 

"Is that your bull over there, sir?" exclaimed the 
judge. 

" Wal, I guess 'tis." 

" "Well, sir, do you know what it's been doing ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 443 

"Chasin' ye, mebbe." 

" Yes, sir, chasing me ; and it is an outrage that I will 
not tolerate — an outrage, I tell you, that I should be 
pursued and humiliated in this way." 

" Wal, it's a thing that bulls will do; he can't help it, 
ye know." 

" Help it ! " said the judge, black with indignation, " do 
you know who I am ? " 

"No, I don't." 

" Well, sir, I am Judge Bumblethorpe." 

" Is — that — so ? " said the farmer, with great delibera- 
tion; "is — that — so? Why in thunder didn't ye tell 
the bull, jedge?" 

Lord Plunket had a son in the church at the time the 
Tithe Corporation Act was passed, and warmly supported 
the measure. Some one observed, " I wonder how it is 
that so sensible a man as Plunket cannot see the imper- 
fections in the Tithe Corporation Act." 

"The reason's plain enough," said ISTorbury; "he has 
the sun (son) in his eye? 

Judge Rombauer one day made a ruling against a young 
attorney, whose superfluity of diplomas was only equaled 
by his scant knowledge of law, and the latter, much dis- 
gusted, said: 

" I don't know where your honor goes to find such law 
as that." 

" I am not surprised, Mr. , zat you know not where 

I go to find ze law, for I find it in ze books." 

When Judge Thacher, of Maine, was prominent at the 
bar, he and the attorney-general were on opposite sides 
of an exciting trial. The latter, in the heat of dispute,, 
said: 

"You are no gentleman, sir." 



444 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" I admit, Mr. Attorney-General, I am no gentleman." 
Judge (a venerable man, archly): "Well, gentlemen, 
I think you needn't go to the jury about that! " 

"When the establishment of the mint was under discus- 
sion, there were some amusing debates in Congress con- 
cerning the devices the coins should bear. A member of 
the House from the South bitterly opposed the choice of 
the eagle, on the ground of its being the " king of birds," 
and hence neither proper nor suitable to represent a na- 
tion whose institutions and interests were wholly inimical 
to monarchical forms of government. Judge Thacher in 
reply playfully suggested that perhaps a goose might suit 
the gentlemen, as it was rather a humble and republican 
bird, and would also be serviceable in other respects, as 
the goslings would answer to place upon the dimes. 

This reply created considerable merriment, and the irate 
Southerner, considering the humorous rejoinder an insult, 
sent a challenge to the judge, who promptly declined it. 
The bearer, rather astonished, asked, "Will you be 
branded as a coward ? " 

" Certainly, if he pleases," replied Thacher. " I always 
was one, and he knew it, or he would never have risked 
a challenge." 

Not even the occupants of the Bench in Ireland are 
free from that proneness to make " bulls " which is one 
of the curious mental characteristics of the Irish people. 

" Are you married ? " asked a magistrate in the Dublin 
police court of a prisoner who was charged with having 
committed an unprovoked assault on another man. 

" No, your worship," replied the man in the dock. 

" That's a good thing for your wife," said the magis- 
trate. 

A witness giving evidence in a case tried at the Limerick 



BENCH AND BAR. 445 

Assizes used the expression, very common in Ireland, " I 
said to myself," so frequently that the judge interposed 
with the remark : 

" You must not tell us what you said to yourself, unless 
the prisoner was by. It is not evidence." 

Repartee and Retort, Witnesses'. — When a wit- 
ness occasionally turns the tables on a lawyer, the latter's 
discomfiture is enjoyed even by his friends. 

One of the very best things ever said by a witness to a 
counsel was the repty given to Missing, the barrister, at 
the time leader of his circuit. He was defending a pris- 
oner charged with stealing a donkey. The prosecutor 
had left the animal tied up to a gate, and when he re- 
turned it was gone. Missing was very severe in his exam- 
ination of the witness : 

" Do you mean to say the donkey was stolen from that 
gate?" 

" I mean to say, sir, that the ass was Missing." 

" Remember, witness," exclaimed the attorney for the 
defence, "you are on oath." 

"There ain't no danger of my forgettin' it," replied the 
witness, sullenly, " I'm tellin' the truth for nothin' when 
I could have made fifteen shillings by lyin' for your side 
of the case, and you know it." 

When Burton, the actor, was in " trouble," a young 
lawyer was examining him as to how he had spent his 
money. There were three thousand pounds unaccounted 
for. The attorney, putting on a severe, scrutinizing face, 
exclaimed, with much self-complacency: 

" Now, sir, I want you to tell this court and jury how 
you used those three thousand pounds ? " 



446 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" The lawyers got that ! " was Burton's quick reply 
The judge and audience were convulsed with laughter. 
The counselor was glad to let the comedian go. 

Kees, the mimic, once appeared in the Court of King's 
Bench, as bail for a friend. Justice Garrow asked him 
whether he was not an imitator. 

" So they tell me." 

" Tell you ! You know it, sir. Are you not in the 
habit of taking people off?" said the judge. 

" Oh, yes, and I shall take myself off the moment your 
lordship has done with me!" 

Counsel, to prisoner: "Well, after the witness gave 
you a blow, what happened ? " 
" He gave me a third one." 
" You mean a second one." 
" No, sir ; I landed him the second one." 

The offensively familiar witness is a sore trial. The 
dignity and the erudition of the most eminent counsel 
are thrown away on him. In an important case in an 
English chancery court a loquacious witness was asked : 

" What sort of a man was he ? " 

The reply came swiftly: 

" Just an under-sized, red-faced chap like yourself." 

" One more question," said the counsel. " Has not an 
attempt been made to induce you to tell the court and 
jury a different story?" 

"Yes, sir; I guess you've tried 'bout as hard as any of 
'em." 

Lawyer (fiercely) : " Are you telling the truth ? " 
Badgered witness (wearily): "As much of it as you 
will let me." 



BENCH AND BAR. 447 

A bullying barrister would make a butt of a Yorkshire 
farmer: 

" Well, Farmer Numskull, how goes calves at York ? " 

« Why not, sir, as they do wi' you, 

But on four legs instead of two." 

" Officer ! " cried the legal elf, 

Piqued at the laugh against himself, 

" Do pray keep silence down below there ! 

Now look at me, clown, and attend; 

Have I not seen you somewhere, friend ? " 

" Yees, very like; I often go there." 

" The rustic 's waggish — quite laconical," 

The counsel cried, with grin sardonical; 

" I wish I'd known this prodigy, 

This genius of the clods, when I 

On circuit was at York residing. 

But, Farmer, do for once speak true. 

Mind, you're on ot.th; so tell me, you 

Who, doubtless, think yourself so clever, 

Are there as many fools as ever 

In the West Riding?" 

« Why, no, sir, no; we've got our share, 

But not 80 many as when you were there." 

— Horace Smith. 

During a trial, counsel, in cross-examining a young 
physician, made several sarcastic remarks, doubting the 
ability of so young a man to understand his business. 
Finally he asked: 

"Do you know the symptoms of concussion of the 
brain ? " 

" I do," replied the doctor. 

" Well," continued the attorney, " suppose my learned 
friend, Mr. Carter, and myself were to bang our heads to- 
gether, would we get concussion of the brain?" 

" Your learned friend, Mr. Carter, might," said the 
doctor. 

Judge: " And so he called you a scoundrel?" 
Prisoner: " He did, sor." 



448 WIT AND HUMOR 

" And did you attempt to defend yourself?" 
" Did I ? You ought to see Duffy." 

" Now, sir," said an attorney, " Do I understand you 
to say that you were standing within ten feet of the par- 
ties when the fight began ? " 

Witness, to the court: "Must I answer that question?" 
The Court: " I see nothing wrong in the question." 
Witness, to attorney : " Well, sir, I don't know whether 
you understand me to say it or not." 

Reputation, General. — A humorous story, touching 
the introduction of testimony affecting "general reputa- 
tion," is related by a Southwestern judge. In a trial 
before him to recover the value of harness loaned the de- 
fendant, the defendant denied title or possession through 
plaintiff, and alleged that plaintiff's general reputation 
for truth was bad. Counsel for defendant, concluding it 
would be good tactics to first break down the plaintiff's 
character, called Thomas Jefferson, a colored man, as a 
witness : 

" Mr. Jefferson, do you know the plaintiff ? " 

"Yes, sah." 

"Do you live in the same neighborhood?" 

" Yes, sah; we bofe lives in Kock Springs." 

" Do you know what kind of character he bears among 
his. neighbors for truth and honesty ? " 

" He bears the wus kind of character, sah." 

" Do you know what the people in that neighborhood 
generally say of him ? " 

" Cose I knows what dey say 'bout him, but I ain't 
come here to tell dat. I come to tell what I knows about 
him myself." 

" No, you are not allowed to tell what you know about 



BENCH AND BAR. 449 

him yourself, but you are only allowed to tell what peo- 
ple say about him." 

"You don't mean dat?" 

" Yes, that is what I mean." 

"Not much; I knows better'n dat myself. I been 
about court-house too much for you to talk dat way to 
me." 

The court explained the situation to the witness, and 
he seemed reluctantly reconciled. Examination by coun- 
sel then proceeded: 

"Do you know the plaintiff's general reputation for 
truth and honesty in the vicinity in which he lives ? " 

" Now you wants me to tell what de folks say, and not 
what I knows myself ? " 

" Yes." 

The witness gave an earnest look at the court, as if 
asking protection from the outrage, but, finding the court 
seemingly as bad as the counsel, said: 

" Well, I heard Mrs. Smith say dat he was de biggest 
liar in de world, and dat he stole Mr. Smith's geers out 
of the butcher-shop, and I knows myself that he stole de 
geers, 'cause I seen 'im wid 'em." 

" That is not an answer to my question. I don't ask 
you what any one person says, but what the people say." 

"Dat is jes what I'm going to tell you, but I got to 
tell what one say at a time. I can't tell you what dey 
all say at once. Jerry Gibson told me dat he saw de 
man — " 

" I don't want to know what Jerry Gibson said, nor 
what Mrs. Smith said, nor what anybody else said. I ask 
you what the man's general reputation is for truth and 
honesty, and by that I mean what do all the people say 
about him ? " 

" Now, how can I tell you what dey all says about him, 
29 



450 WIT AND HUMOR. 

when you won't let me tell you what one of 'em says 
about him ? " 

Counsel and witness fenced with each other in this 
manner for a long time, with no other result than a loss 
of temper and a strong manifestation of disgust on both 
sides. At last counsel made an effort at self-control and 
said: 

"Well, Mr. Jefferson, since you and I can't understand 
each other on that branch of the case, let us leave it and 
go to the next subject. Now, tell us what you know 
about this harness ? " 

" I knows all about dem harness, an' everybody around 
Kock Springs knows dem harness, and dey all sez de 
harness belongs by right to de defendant." 

" Now, I did not ask you to tell what everybody says 
about the harness, but only what you knew about it your- 
self." 

" What I knows myself ? " 

"Yes." 

" Why ain't you been beating me down for the last 
hour to keep me from telling what I knowed myself and 
to try to make me tell what everybody says ? I knowed 
dey wasn't no sense in dat, and I ain't going to stan' up 
here and let you make a fool o' me no mo'." 

And the witness arose in disgust, walked down from 
the witness stand and out of the court room. Defend- 
ant's counsel never rallied, and the verdict was for the 
plaintiff. 

In the United States Circuit Court, before Judges Saw- 
yer and Hoffman and a jury, in 1873, in the trial of Cap- 
tain Clarke of the " Sunrise" for cruelty to sailors, the 
defence called a seaman to testify to the captain's rep- 
utation for kindness and humanity. On cross-exami- 



BENCH AND BAR. 451 

nation by General W. H. L. Barnes, the following was 
elicited : 

"Did you ever hear Captain Clarke's reputation for 
kindness and humanity talked about on the Marv Bent- 
ley " (a former vessel of Clarke's) ? 

" Yes." 

" Whom did you hear talk about it ? " 

" Well, Tom, for one." 

"Who was Tom?" 

" A sailor. Don't know his full name." 

" Did you hear anybody else talk about it ? " 

" Yes." 

"Whom?" 

" All the sailors." 

"What did they say?" 

" When I used to take them grub." 

" What did they say ? " 

" They said it was good." 

" What was good ? " 

" The grub." 

Rcsekraus, Enoch H. — Judge Eosekraus, one of 
the keenest wits of the New York bench, Loved to tease 
his dignified brother-in-law, William A. Beach. The lat- 
ter having made a motion before him, the judge intimated 
pretty plainly that he thought Beach was wrong. But 
Beach was not to be put down in this way, and persisted 
in his argument, citing a decision which he declared was 
the latest, and to which he said he hoped his honor would 
yield. 

" But there is a later decision the other way," said the 
judge." 

" 1 am not aware of it," said Beach very stiffly ; " where 
may it be found ? " 



4:52 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" It is the one I made in this case about ten minutes 
ago. Any other motions, gentlemen?" 

On another occasion Eosekraus was hearing a criminal 
prosecution for an assault and battery committed on the 
day of a political convention in the interest of General 
McClellan. An old soldier had testified, and on cross- 
examination was asked if he was attending the conven- 
tion. 

" No, sir," said the witness ; "that wasn't my stripe." 

Great laughter ensued, and the judge, who also was 
not of " that stripe," rapped to order, observing with a 
deprecatory air : 

u The witness has a right to exculpate himself." 

Russell, Lord. — Eussell is an eminent jurist, a fa- 
mous orator, and a bright wit. When he was still known 
as Sir Charles Eussell, he went to Scotland to help the 
Liberals in a certain campaign. He purposely began his 
speech with some very-badly pronounced Scotch. After 
the confusion caused by his apparent blunder had sub- 
sided, he said : 

"Gentlemen, I do not speak Scotch, but I vote 
Scotch — ." Tremendous applause followed, whereupon 
he proceeded, " and I often drjnk Scotch." 

After this he was the hero of the hour. 

During his argument in a case involving the applica- 
tion of nice legal principles, Eussell was repeatedly an- 
noyed by the interruptions of Sir Digby Seymour, coun- 
sel for the other side. At last, losing all patience, he 
broke out in his strong Irish brogue : 

" I wish you wouldn't interrupt so much, Sir Digby 
Saymour." 

" My name is Seymour, not Saymour," answered Sir 
Digby, sharply. 



BENCH AND BAR. 453 

" Well, then," rejoined Eussell, " you should see more 
and say less." 

A young lawyer, making a legal argument and anxious 
to finish before adjournment of the court, was hurrying 
along as best he could. Suddenly he spoke of 2 Q. B. D. 
Eussell interrupted him sharply: 

" You forget yourself, sir ! You forget yourself ! That 
is no way to address this court." 

Profuse in his apologies, the young attorney explained 
that he only meant to refer to 2 Queen's Bench Division 
of the Law Keports. Eussell, refusing to be appeased, 
said: 

" I might as well say to you, U. B. D." 

A story credited to Lord Coleridge is also credited in 
a slightly different form to Eussell; and Eussell's version 
is the brighter of the two. When he was visiting this 
country, he took a stroll along the Potomac river with 
William M. Evarts, then Secretary of State. Arriving at 
a special point of interest, Evarts said : 

"This is where George Washington threw a dollar 
across the Potomac." 

"Oh," responded Eussell, "that must have been an 
easy task for a man who cast a sovereign over the At- 
lantic." 

Eussell, years before he took silk, was sitting in court, 
when another barrister, leaning across the benches dur- 
ing the hearing of a trial for bigamy, whispered, " Eus- 
sell, what's the extreme penalty for bigamy ? " 

" Two mothers-in-law." 

Saunders, R,. M. — The late Judge Saunders, of the 
Supreme Court of North Carolina, an angler and wag of 
the first water, told many different stories about the 



4:54 WIT AND HUMOR. 

weight of a big catfish he had caught. A friend, trying 
to entrap him, said : 

"Judge, what was the weight of that big fish you 
caught?" 

The judge, turning to his colored waiter, said: 
" Bob, what did I say yesterday that catfish weighed ? " 
"What time yesterday, boss — in de mawning, at din- 
ner time, or after supper ? " 



Saxe, John G. — Saxe, of literary fame, was a member 
of the Vermont bar. His Briefless Barrister is a gem in 
legal literature : 

An attorney was taking a turn, 

In shabby habiliments drest; 
His coat it was shockingly worn, 

And the rust had invested his vest. 

His breeches had suffered a breach, 

His linen and worsted were worse, 
He had scarce a whole crown in his hat, 

And not half-a-crown in his purse. 

And thus as he wandered along, 

A cheerless and comfortless elf, 
He sought for relief in a song, 

Or complainingly talked to himself: 

" Unfortunate man that I am ! 

I've never a client but grief; 
The case is, I've no case at all, 

And in brief, I've ne'er had a brief 1 

"I've waited, and waited in vain, 

Expecting an opening to find, 
Where an honest young lawyer might gain 

Some reward for toil of his mind. 

** 'Tis not that I'm wanting in law, 

Or lack an intelligent face, 
That others have cases to plead, 

While I have to plead for a case ! 



BENCH AND BAR. 455 

"0, how can a modest young man 

E'er hope for the smallest progression, 
The profession's already so full 

Of lawyers so full of profession! " 

While thus he was strolling around, 

His eye accidentally fell 
On a very deep hole in the ground, 

And he sighed to himself, " It is well! " 

To curb his emotions, he sat 

On the curb-stone the space of a minute; 

Then cried, " Here's an opening at last! " 
And in less than a jiffy was in it. 

Next morning twelve citizens came 

('Twas the coroner bade them attend), 
To the end that it might be determined 

How the man had determined his end. 

"The man was a lawyer, I hear! " 
Quoth the foreman who sat on the corse. 

"A lawyer? alas! " said another, 
"Undoubtedly died of remorse." 

A third said " He knew the deceased, 

An attorney well versed in the laws; 
And as to the cause of his death, 

'Twas no doubt for the want of a cause! n 

The jury decided at length, 

After solemnly weighing the matter, 
" That the lawyer was drowned because 

He could not keep his head above water." 

Quite as interesting is his Early Rising: 

"God bless the man who first invented sleepl n 

So Sancho Panza said, and so say I; 
And bless him, also, that he didn't keep 

His great discovery to himself, nor try 
To make it — as the lucky fellow might — 
A close monopoly by patent-right! 



456 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Yes; bless the man who first invented sleep, 
(I really can't avoid the iteration;) 

But blast the man with curses loud and deep, 
Whate'er the rascal's name or age or station, 

Who first invented, and went round advising, 

That artificial cut-off — Early Rising I 

"Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed," 
Observes some solemn, sentimental owl; 

Maxims like these are very cheaply said; 
But, ere you make yourself a fool or fowl, 

Pray just inquire about his rise and fall, 

And whether larks have any beds at all I 

The time for honest folks to be abed 
Is in the morning, if I reason right; 

And he who cannot keep his precious head 
Upon his pillow till it's fairly light, 

And so enjoy his forty morning winks, 

Is up to knavery, or else — he drinks! 

Thomson, who sang about the " Seasons," said 
It was a glorious thing to rise in season; 

But then he said it — lying — in his bed, 
At ten o'clock A. M., — the very reason 

He wrote so charmingly. The simple fact is, 

His preaching wasn't sanctioned by his practice. 

'Tis, doubtless, well to be sometimes awake, — 
Awake to duty, and awake to truth, — 

But when, alas ! a nice review we take 
Of our best deeds and days, we find, in sooth, 

The hours that leave the slightest cause to weep 

Are those we passed in childhood, or asleep! 

Tis beautiful to leave the world awhile 
•For the soft visions of the gentle night; 

And free, at last, from mortal care or guile, 
To live as only in the angels' sight, 

In sleep's sweet realm so cosily shut in, 

Where, at the worst, we only dream of sin I 



BENCH AND BAR. 457 

So let us sleep, and give the Maker praise. 

I like the lad who, when his father thought 
To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase 

Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, 
Cried, " Served him right ! — it's not at all surprising; 
The worm was punished, sir, for early rising ! " 

Scott, Sir Walter. — Scott had his share of curious 
experiences shortly after being called to the bar. His 
first appearance in a criminal court was at Jedburg as- 
sizes, in 1793, when he successfully defended a veteran 
poacher. 

" You're a lucky scoundrel," Scott whispered to his 
client when the verdict was given. 

" I'm just of your mind," returned the latter, " and I'll 
send you a maukin — a hare — the morn, man." 

On another occasion Scott was less successful in his de- 
fence of a housebreaker; but the culprit, grateful for his 
counsel's exertions, gave him, in lieu of the orthodox fee, 
this piece of advice, to the value of which he (the house- 
breaker) could professionally attest: First, never to have 
a large watchdog out of doors, but to keep a little yelping 
terrier within; and second, to put no trust in nice, clever, 
gimcrack locks, but to pin his faith to a huge old heavy 
one with a rusty key. Scott long remembered this inci- 
dent, and thirty years later, at a judges' dinner at Jed- 
burg, he recalled it in this impromptu rhyme: 

"Yelping terrier, rusty key, 
"Was Walter Scott's best Jedburg fee." 

In his school-boy days Scott was far from being a brill- 
iant scholar. He was usually at the head of the other end 
of his class. After becoming famous, he one day dropped 
into the old school to visit the scene of his former woes. 
The teacher, anxious to make a good impression, put the 



458 WIT AND HUMOR. 

pupils through their lessons so as to show them to the 
best advantage. 

After a while Scott said : " But which is the dunce ? 
You have one, surely?" 

The teacher called up a poor fellow who looked the 
picture of woe as he bashfully came toward the distin- 
guished visitor. 

"Are you the dunce?" asked Scott. 

"Yes, sir." 

" "Well, my good fellow, here is a crown for you for 
keeping my place warm." 

Seal. — Judge Harrington, of Vermont, was famous as 
the man who would not give up a slave without a title 
from the " original proprietor." Technical objections did 
not weigh heavily with the judge, as one Daniel Chip- 
man found in a case of ejectment. Chipman objected to 
the admission of a deed because it had no seal. 

" But your client sold the land, got his pay for it and 
gave the deed, didn't he?" asked the judge. 

" That makes no difference," said Chipman, " the deed 
has no seal and cannot be admitted." 

"Mr. Clerk," said the judge, "give me a wafer and a 
three-cornered piece of paper." 

The clerk obey3d, and the judge deliberately made and 
affixed the seal. 

" There, Brother Chipman," said the judge, " the deed 
is all right now, and may be put in evidence. A man is 
not going to be cheated out of his farm in this court be- 
cause his deed lacks a wafer when there is a whole box 
of wafers on the clerk's desk." 

In Hopewell v t Amwell, 6 K J. L. (1 Halst.) 169, Kirk- 
patrick, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court 
of New Jersey to the effect that a scroll or scribble, by 



BENCH AND BAR 45£ 

way of seal, upon an indenture of apprenticeship, did not 
make a formal indenture. In the course of the opinion 
the learned Chief Justice said : 

" There has been a good deal of speculation of the courts 
of some of these states upon this subject. They have in- 
vestigated, with profound learning, the nature, origin and 
utility of seals, and of what a seal must consist. And 
some of them have made the wonderful discovery that a 
seal may be not only without any distinct impression, but 
also without wax, or anything in the nature of wax, in 
any way susceptible of impression. To have said that 
sealing should not be necessary to constitute a deed, but 
that the subscription of the name only should be sufficient 
for that purpose, would have had some foundation in rea- 
son, however little it might have in law, to support it ; 
but to say that a writing is sealed without anything af- 
fixed to it in the nature of a seal is a little like Lord 
Peter's saying that his brown loaf was as fine a leg of 
mutton as ever came out of the Leadenhall market." 

Selden, John. — Selden was an English lawyer of 
great wisdom and learning. 

Equity is a roguish thing; for law we have a measure. 

Equity is according to the conscience of him that is 
chancellor; and as that is longer or narrower, so is equity. 

Every man has his religion. We differ about trim- 
ming. 

Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the 
world. 

'Tis not seasonable to call a man a traitor that has an 
army at his heels. 



460 WIT AND HUMOR 

Sentences. — In sentencing a prisoner convicted of 
stealing from his employer, Sergeant Arabin thus ad- 
dressed him: 

" Prisoner at the bar, if ever there was a clearer case 
than this of a man robbing his master, this case is that 
case." 

Having to pass judgment on a middle-aged man, who, 
convicted upon three indictments, had pleaded guilty to 
more, Arabin said: 

" Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty on 
several indictments, and it is in my power to subject you 
to transportation for a period very considerably beyond 
the term of your natural life; but the court, in its mercy, 
will not go so far as it lawfully might, and the sentence 
is that you be transported for two periods of seven years 
each." 

In sentencing a man to a comparatively light punish- 
ment, he said: 

"Prisoner at the bar, there are mitigating circum- 
stances in this case that induce me to take a lenient view 
of it, and I will therefore give you a chance of redeem- 
ing a character that you have irretrievably lost." 

One of the ablest judges of New Mexico was the Hon- 
orable Kirby Benedict. His death sentence upon Jose 
Maria Martin is yet regarded in New Mexico as a solemn 
landmark of judicial reminiscence. 

It was early in the sixties in the county of Taos, when 
a Mexican, Jose Maria Martin, was convicted of murder, 
and brought into court to receive sentence. The prisoner 
stood up, and, after the usual questions to him, the judge, 
prompted by the atrocity of the crime, said: 

" Jose Maria Martin, you have been indicted, tried and 
convicted by a jury of your countrymen of the crime of 



BENCH AND BAR. 461 

murder, and the court is now about to pass upon you the 
dread sentence of the law. As a usual thing, Jose Maria 
Martin, it is a painful duty to sentence a man to death ; 
there is something horrid about it, and the mind of the 
court naturally revolts from the performance of such duty. 
Happily, however, your case is relieved of all these dis- 
agreeable features, and the court takes positive delight in 
sentencing you to death. You are a young man, Jose 
Maria Martin, seemingly of good health and strong con- 
stitution. Ordinarily you must have looked forward to 
many years of life — to a green old age, — but you are 
about to be cut off in consequence of your own act. It 
is now the springtime, Jose Maria Martin; in a little 
while the grass will be springing up green on these broad 
mesas, these beautiful valleys and mountains. Flowers 
will be blooming, birds will be singing their sweet carols, 
nature will be putting on her most gorgeous and most at- 
tractive robes; life will be pleasant and men will want 
to stay. But none of this for you, Jose Maria Martin. 
The flowers will not bloom for you, Jose Maria Martin. 
The birds will not sing for you, Jose Maria Martin. When 
these things come to gladden the senses of men, you will 
be occupying a space about six by two beneath the sod, 
and the green grass and the beautiful flowers be growing 
above your lowly head. 

" The sentence of the court is that you be taken from 
this place to the county jail, there to be kept safely and 
securely confined, in the custody of the sheriff, until the 
day set for your execution. Be very careful, Mr. Sheriff, 
that he have no opportunity to escape, and that you have 
him at the appointed time and at the appointed place — 
and that you be thus kept until — Mr. Clerk, on what day 
of the month does Friday, about two weeks from this 
time, come ? 



462 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" March 22, your honor. 

" Yery well, until Friday, the 22d day of March, when 
you will be taken by the sheriff from your place of con- 
finement to some safe and convenient spot within the 
county, — that is in your discretion, Mr. Sheriff, you are 
only confined to the limits of the county, — and that you 
there be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and — 
the court was about to add, Jose Maria Martin, 'may 
God have mercy on your soul,' but the court will not as- 
sume the responsibility of asking an All Wise Providence 
to do that which a jury of your peers has refused to do. 
The Lord couldn't have mercy on your soul. However, if 
you have any religious belief, or are connected with any 
religious organization, it might be well enough for you 
to send for your priest or your minister, and get from 
him — well — such consolation as you can; but the court 
advises you to place no reliance upon anything of that 
kind. 

" Mr. Sheriff, remove the prisoner." 

Dr. Jowett, head of Balliol College, Oxford, was dis- 
cussing with a friend the careers of two successful Bal- 
liol men. One of these alumni had just been made a 
judge, the other a bishop, and Dr. Jowett's friend re- 
marked : 

" I think a bishop is a greater man than a judge. A 
judge, at the most, can only say, ' You be hanged ; ' but 
a bishop can say, ' You be damned.' 

" Yes," replied the other, " but if the judge says, * You 
be hanged,' you are hanged." 

A Missouri judge, in passing sentence on a colored man 
convicted of highway robbery, said : 

" Jim, stand up ! The jury that tried you found you 
guilty of highway robbery, and assessed your punishment 



BENCH AND BAR. 463 

&t fifteen years in the penitentiary. You had a fair trial. 
The two young lawyers I assigned to you as counsel did 
everything for you that could be done. Now, I don't say 
you're guilty. I wouldn't say that. But the circum- 
stances are suspicious. Somebody was robbed on the high- 
way of $70, three twenty -dollar bills and a ten-dollar bill. 
It was proved you changed two twenty-dollar bills shortly 
after, and your wife changed another, and you didn't show 
how you came by these bills. Now, if I had been accused 
of this offence unjustly, I would have said, why, I got this 
money from so and so, and then called that person as a 
witness. But you didn't do that, and your case looks bad. 
However, if you are innocent, think what a satisfaction 
it will be to you, as you enter the penitentiary, to feel in 
your breast that you are an innocent man ! And now, 
let me give you a piece of advice. You have only got a 
sentence of fifteen years. Had you been a white man, the 
jury would have given you a much larger sentence. But 
we white people have compassion on you colored people. 
We remember your want of education and make allow- 
ances for you. My advice is: Behave yourself while you 
are in the penitentiary. If you do, you will have to serve 
only eleven years and three months. Think of that. If 
you do behave, the warden will at the end of that time 
report to the Governor, and he will pardon you. Mind 
you, the Governor has no discretion when the warden 
makes his favorable report. He's got to clo it, and I don't 
suppose the Governor would shirk his duty. Sit down, 
Jim ! " 

Judge (to prisoner): "We are now going to read the 
list of your former convictions." 

" In that case, perhaps your worship will allow me to 
sit down." 



464 WIT AND HUMOR 

Dublin once boasted a magistrate, Justice O'Malley, 
whose eloquence and erudition made him the pride and 
delight of the city. " So, sorr," he thundered to an old 
offender who had often escaped what the judge always 
spoke of as the 'butt end of the law,' "y' arre about to 
incur the pinilty of your malefactions. Justice, sorr, may 
purshue wid a leaden heel, but she smites" — here the 
quotation eluded him — "she smites" — triumphantly — 
" she smites wid a cast oiron toe ! 

Governor Ford used to relate a rich anecdote of one 
of the early judges of Illinois, but he never named the 
sensitive and considerate member of the bench. At the 
court over which this judge presided, a man by the name 
of Green was convicted of murder, and the judge was 
obliged to pass sentence of death upon the culprit. Call- 
ing on the prisoner to rise, the judge said to him: 

" Mr. Green, the jury say you are guilty of murder, and 
the law says you are to be hung. I want you, and all your 
friends down on Indian Creek, to know that it is not I 
who condemn you ; it is the jury and the law. Mr. Green, 
at what time, sir, would you like to be hung; the law 
allows you time for preparation." 

The prisoner replied : " May it please your honor, I am 
ready at any time; those who kill the body have no 
power to kill the soul. My preparation is made, and you 
can fix the time to suit yourself ; it is all the same to me, 
sir." 

"Mr. Green,"' returned the judge, "it is a very serious 
matter to be hung; it can't happen to a man but once in 
his life, unless the rope should break before his neck is 
broke ; and you had better take all the time you can get. 
Mr. Clerk, since it makes no difference to Mr. Green 
when he is hung, just look into the almanac, and see 
whether this day four weeks comes on Sunday." 



BENCH AND BAR 465 

The clerk looked as he was directed, and reported that 
that day four weeks came on Thursday. 

" Then," said the judge, " Mr. Green, if you please, you 
will be hung this day four weeks at twelve o'clock." 

The attorney-general, James Turney, here interposed: 
" May it please the court, on occasions of this sort, it is 
usual to pronounce a formal sentence, to remind the pris- 
oner of his perilous condition, to reprove him for his 
guilt, and to warn him against the judgment in the world 
to come." 

" Oh, Mr. Turney," said the judge, " Mr. Green under- 
stands the whole matter; he knows he has got to be hung. 
You understand it, Mr. Green, don't you ? " 

" Certainly," said the prisoner. 

" Mr. Sheriff, adjourn the court." 

Four weeks from that day Mr. Green was hung, but 
not so much to his own satisfaction as his appearance 
promised on the day of his conviction. 

Judge (to prisoner about to be sentenced) : " You have 
been convicted several times before, haven't you ? " 

" Yes, your honor, but I've been acquitted several 
times, too." 

A venerable and benevolent judge in Paris, at the mo- 
ment of passing sentence on a prisoner, consulted his asso- 
ciates as to the proper penalty to be inflicted. 

"What ought we to give this rascal, brother?" 

" I should say three years." 

" What is your opinion, brother ? " 

" I should give him about four years." 

The judge, with benevolence: "Prisoner, not desiring 
to give you a long and severe term of imprisonment, as I 
should have done if left to myself, I have consulted my 
learned brothers, and I shall take their advice. Seven 

years ! " 
30 



466 WIT AND HUMOR. 

" Prisoner," said a judge in passing sentence, " not only 
have you committed murder, but you have run a bayonet 
through the breeches of one of Her Majesty's uniforms." 

Justice Maule once addressed a defendant, in the pres- 
ence of the jury which had convicted him: 

" Prisoner at the bar, your counsel thinks you innocent; 
I think you innocent; but a jury of } T our own country- 
men, in the exercise of such common sense as they pos- 
sess, which does not appear to be much, have found you 
guilty, and it remains that I should pass upon you the 
sentence of the law. That sentence is, that you be kept 
in imprisonment for one day, and as that day was yester- 
day, you may go about your business." 

A tender-hearted Southern judge, seeing that the evi- 
dence in a murder case was going strongly against a 
young man, and dreading to pronounce the sentence 
which seemed inevitable, left the courtroom under some 
pretext, returning presently fortified with several strong 
•drinks. 

"When the jury, greatly to the surprise of every one, 
brought in a verdict of "JN T ot guilty," the judge was 
slumbering on the bench and had to be aroused to hear 
the decision. 

Utterly unable, in the bewildered state of his brain, to 
take in the unexpected result, the old man said, solemnly, 
brushing an imaginary insect from his nose, as was his 
custom under the influence of strong spirits : 

" Jones, it now becomes my painful duty — " 

" Your honor — " put in one of the jury. 

"Mr. Moriarity," said the judge, "you must not inter- 
rupt the court." 

" Mr. Jones," continued the judge, turning to the pris- 
oner, " I knew your father, sir, an eminently good citizen, 



BENCH AND BAR. 467 

who little thought his son would end his life on the gal- 
lows, for you are to b3 hanged by the neck, sir, until — " 

" Your honor," said Moriarity again, almost implor- 
ingly, " permit me to explain — " 

" Mr. Moriarity," replied the judge, rather warmly, " I 
insist that you do not interrupt me again" (striking at 
the imaginary insect) "while lam performing the most 
solemn duty of my official life. Mr. Jones" (again ad- 
dressing the prisoner), " I know, sir, that this sentence, 
which I feel constrained to pronounce, is breaking the 
heart of your poor old mother " (pointing unwittingly to 
the widow of the murdered man — looking daggers at 
the jury), " and sir, bringing her grey hairs in sorrow to 
the grave. For you are to be hanged, sir — to be — " 

" Judge ! " shouted Moriarity, in desperation, unable to 
contain himself any longer, " you are making a fool of 
yourself; the jury has brought in a verdict of 'Not 
guilty!'" 

Mr. Justice Kidley, a brother of Sir Matthew "White 
Ridley, the British Home Secretary, is the victim of a 
good story. While trying a case at an Assizes in the 
North of England, his lordship, before passing sentence, 
was reading over the list of previous convictions against 
the prisoner; and he was surprised to find that he him- 
self had only recently sentenced the man in the dock to 
five years' penal servitude. Ridley thought there must 
be some mistake. On his asking how it was that the ex- 
convict was at large again so soon, the prisoner replied, 
" I was released by your brother," and then added with 
emphasis, " It was a werry improper sentence." 

Justice Graham, one of the most affable judges that 
ever adorned the bench, having hastily condemned a man, 
who had been capitally convicted, to transportation, the 



468 WIT AND HUMOR. 

clerk of the court in a whisper set him right. " Oh," he 
exclaimed. " Criminal ! I beg your pardon, come back," 
and, putting on the black cap, apologized for his mistake, 
and then consigned him to the gallows, to be hanged by 
the neck until he was dead. To one guilty of burglary, 
or a similar offence, he would say, " My honest friend, 
you are found guilty of felony, for which it is my pain- 
ful duty," etc. Among other peculiarities, he had a cus- 
tom of repeating the answer made to him, as illustrated 
in the following dialogue: "My good friend, you are 
charged with murder; what have you to observe on the 
subject ? Eh, how did it happen ? " " Why, my lord, 
Jem aggravated me, and swore as how he'd knock the 
breath out of my body." " Good, he'd knock the breath 
out of your body ; and what did you reply ? " " Nothing ; 
I floored him." " Good ; and then ? " " Why, then, my 
lord, they took him up and found that his head was cut 
open." "His head was cut open; good; and what fol- 
lowed?" "After that, my lord, they gathered him up 
to take him to the hospital, but he died on the road." 
"He died on the road; very good." 

The golden rule shines like a gem in this little master- 
piece : 

Judge: "Prisoner at the bar, have you anything fur- 
ther to state in your defence ? " 

"No, my lord; just deal with me as you would with 
yourself if you were in m} 7 place." 

Eather a good story used to be told by Justice Porter, 
the well-known legal bon vivant of Dublin. It concerns 
a rare old Irish judge on the Northwest Circuit, who 
loved the hunting-field more than he did the stupid, sleepy 
court room. His clerk was like minded, and a joyous pair 
they made. 



BENCH AND BAR. 469 

One fine morning the clerk whispered to the judge: 

" Yer honor, old Billy Duane's meet's to-day at Bally- 
kill-mulligan, an' they've a fine dog-fox." 

" How many's on the dock ? " asked the judge, excitedly. 

" Twenty, for rioting and breach of peace, your honor." 

" Tim," said the judge, " do you think you can get the 
first fellow to plead guilty without a jury trial, and me 
to let him off with a week in gaol ? " 

" The easiest thing in the world," answered the faith- 
ful clerk. 

" Make haste, then, and bring the whole gang ; and, I 
say, Tim, tell Jerry to saddle the mare meanwhile." 

The twenty Fenians were brought into court — a defi- 
ant gang, nineteen of them prepared to fight with coun- 
sel and jury to the bitter end. The twentieth had been 
interviewed by the clerk. He was called. 

" Guilty or not guilty of the crimes charged ? " de- 
manded the judge, with a propitious smile. 

" Guilty, yer honor," said the crafty prisoner, 

"Well," said the judge, glancing benevolently about 
the room, " I fancy I can let you off with a week." 

The man thanked the judge and stepped down to the 
bailiff. There was a terrific sensation among the other 
defendants. Why, none of them expected to g°t off with 
less than five years in limbo. Here was a chance to profit 
by " his honor's " pleasant mood. One and all manifested 
an earnest desire to follow the example of their comrade 
and acknowledge the crimes in a batch. 

" Do you all plead guilty ? " demanded the judge, ea- 
gerly. 

" We do ! " shouted the enthusiastic nineteen, in chorus. 

" Fourteen years' transportation apiece," exclaimed the 
judge, with a click of his jaw — "Jerry, is the mare sad- 
dled yet?" 



470 WIT AND HUMOR. 

An Irishman, convicted at the Old Bailey Sessions, 
London, on a charge of robbery, was brought into court 
for sentence. 

" You have been convicted of robbery," said the court ; 
" what have you to say why sentence of death should not 
be passed upon you ? " 

" Faith, I've nothing much to say, except that I do not 
think I am safe in your hands." 

The court laughed; sentence was passed, and the pris- 
oner was about to retire, when the officer of the court 
called him back and demanded to know his age. 

" My age, you mane ? " 

" What is your age ? " 

"I believe I am pretty well as ould as ever I'll be." 

Again the court was convulsed with laughter; but the 
wretched man, whose mirth-provoking powers were quite 
involuntary, was doomed even at the scaffold to " set the 
people in a roar." In the press-room his irons were re- 
moved and his arms confined with cords. This being 
done, he seated himself, and in spite of the calls of Jack 
Ketch and of the sheriffs to accompany them in the pro- 
cession to the scaffold, he remained sullenly on the bench. 

" Come," at last urged the hangman, " the time has ar- 
rived." 

But the prisoner would not move. 

"The officers are waiting for you," said the sheriff. 
"Can anything be done for you before you quit this 
world?" 

No answer was returned. Jack Ketch grew surly. 

" If you won't go, I must carry you." 

" Then you may," said the prisoner, " for I'll not walk." 

" Why not ? " inquired a sheriff. 

" I'll not be instrumental to my own death." 

" What do you mean ? " asked the ordinary. 



BENCH AND BAR. 471 

"What do I mane?" retorted the hapless man; "I 
mane that I'll not walk to my own destruction." 

And in this determination he persisted, and was car- 
ried to the scaffold, where he was turned off, refusing to 
do anything which might be construed into his being a 
party to his own death. 

Shaw, Lemuel.— Shaw, the eminent Chief Justice of 
the Massachusetts Supreme Court, never received a higher 
compliment than the blunt one described in the following 
story : 

During the trial of M'Nulty in Boston, in 1859, for 
murder, Joyce, somewhat noted as an assistant at prize- 
fights, was a witness. During the examination, the Chief 
Justice walked to the end of the bench, and in a grave 
way, peering over his spectacles, asked some questions of 
the witness. After the examination the following con- 
versation took place between Joyce and an officer : 

Joyce : " Did you see that chap that sot with two other 
coves behind a little fence there in court — I mean the 
cove called the chief ? " 

Officer: "Oh, yes; you mean Judge Shaw." 

Joyce: "That's him; but what a glorious fellow he'd 
make for a referee ! " 

The eminent fairness of the judge had impressed the 
mind of the coarse man and compelled this praise. 

There are many incidents illustrating the esteem in 
which Shaw was held by the common people — those 
who take a very human satisfaction in having it appear 
that this or that clergyman, or this or that judge, is on 
cheek-by-jowl terms with them. One of his associate 
judges happened one day to be in a Boston barber-shop 
having his hair cut. The garrulous capillary artist re- 
ferred to the Chief Justice as one of his intimate friends, 



472 WIT AND HUMOR. 

and remarked: "The judge hasn't been in since last Sat- 
urday ; I wonder he doesn't come in." After what Charles 
Lamb would call a "brilliant flash of silence," he added, 
with a patronizing air, as if magnanimously excusing the 
delinquent: "But then, I dare say he has something else 
on his mind." 

Brains come in heads of all shapes. There is intelli- 
gence in all kinds of eyes. Manners often hide wisdom. 
Bufus Choate and a friend were dining in the Bevere 
House, Boston, sitting at the table with a short, thick- 
set gentleman who had a very small head, in which were 
two squirrel eyes, positively expressionless. Choate's 
friend could not keep his gaze off the man, who he im- 
agined was an escaped lunatic. Finally, when the creat- 
ure began to devour enormous quantities of food, he 
leaned over and whispered to Choate: 

" Who do you suppose that fellow can be ? " 
" That is the celebrated Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of 
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts." 

Sherman, Roger M. — Sixty years ago Sherman, of 
Connecticut, was one of the leaders of the New England 
bar. He was once engaged in a trial before a pompous 
judge of little ability, who had been lifted to his station 
on his father's shoulders. The judge found fault with 
Sherman for his frequent reference to English authori- 
ties, and, as one of these was about to be read, remarked: 

" You need not take the trouble to read any more of 
these, so far as I am concerned." 

" Well, then," said Sherman, a little warmly, " with 
your honor's permission, I will read it to the jury; and, 
before I read it, let me say it is the opinion of Lord 
Ellenborough, a Chief Justice of England, who rose to 
the woolsack by his own merits, and who shone by no 
reflected light." 



BENCH AND BAR, 473 

Spencer, Joshua A.— In his day Spencer was a brill- 
lant lawyer of the New York bar. In consultation he 
was remarkably prudent in mapping out plans for the 
•conduct of trials. When his associates were, as he thought, 
rather too sanguine as to what the decisions of the court 
would be in respect to admission of evidence, and would 
nrge that the law was so clear that the court could not 
decide otherwise than in their favor, he would relate the 
following anecdote: His first professional experience was 
in defending a man charged with the criminal offence of 
assault and battery, before a justice of the peace. The 
point for the justice to decide was whether there was 
sufficient evidence to justify him in holding the defend- 
ant for trial. After the testimony was all in, there being, 
as Mr. Spencer thought, not sufficient evidence to incrim- 
inate his client, he argued the case very thoroughly. Hav- 
ing demonstrated that his client was entitled to be dis- 
charged, he closed his argument, into which he had thrown 
all the feeling and pathos of which he was capable, by 
saying: 

" On such testimony your honor can't hold my client." 
" Can't, eh ? " said the justice, " I held three men yester- 
day on no evidence at all. Never say ' can't' to me, 
young man." 

Stenography. — Concerning the highest speed ever 
attained by expert short-hand writers, there is a story of 
the feat of a Georgia court stenographer, which, by long 
odds, broke the world's record: The late Judge Richard 
Clarke was presiding in the Atlanta circuit of the Superior 
Court. A remarkable murder trial was in progress. The 
evidence was conflicting, and the judge was called upon 
to charge the jury on some decidedly new and interest- 
ing legal points. The judge was a rapid talker. In this 



474 WIT AND HUMOR. 

instance it was important that every word he spoke 
should be correctly recorded, and he so cautioned the 
stenographer. Then Judge Clarke began. As he warmed 
up to his charge he was speaking at the rate of two hun- 
dred and fi fty words a minute. Once he glanced toward 
the stenographer: 

" Mr. , are you getting my words down correctly ? " 

"That's all right, judge; I am about fifteen words 
ahead of you now." 

Stephens, Alexander H.— - Stephens used to tell 
with a fine mimicry how Peter Bennett, an old Georgia 
farmer, beat Robert Toombs and Dr. Royston in a court 
trial. 

"Royston had sued Bennett for professional services 
rendered ; and I told Bennett," said Stephens, " that he 
could make no defence, and that Bob Toombs, a prom- 
ising young lawyer, was on the other side, and he'd surely 
beat hnn." 

" ' Never mind,' said Bennett, ' I want you to speak in 
the case.' 

" ' No, Bennett, there's no use. If there is any speaking 
you'll have to do it yourself.' 

'"Yery well, I'll do it, then, if you'll hold off Bob 
Toombs.' 

" I told Bennett I'd take care of Toombs, and was utterly 
surprised when Peter started off his speech to the jury: 

" ' Gentlemen of the jury, I ain't no lawyer and no doc- 
tor, and you ain't nuther, and if we farmers don't stick 
together these here lawyers and doctors will get the ad- 
vantage of us. I ain't no objections to lawyers and doc- 
tors in their place, and some is clever men, but they ain't 
farmers, gentlemen of the jury. Now this Dr. Royston 
was a new doctor, and I sent for him to come and doctor 



BENCH AND BAR, 475. 

my wife's sore arm. And he did, and put some salve 
truck on it, and some rags, but it never done a bit of good 
gentlemen of the jury. I don't believe he's no doctor, no 
way. There's doctors as I know is doctors, sure enough, 
but this ain't no doctor at all.' 

" The farmer was making headway with the jury, when 
Dr. Koyston said, ' Here is my diploma.' 

"'His diploma,' said Bennett with great contempt; 
' that ain't nothin', for no piece of paper ever made a 
doctor yet.' 

" * Ask my patients,' yelled the now thoroughly enraged 
physician. 

" ' Ask your patients ? ' slowly repeated Bennett; ' why 
they are all dead.' Then he rapidly enumerated case 
after case, most of them among the negro servants and 
in the neighborhood, of such of the doctor's patients as 
had succumbed to his pills and powders, and continued: 
'Ask your patients! Why, I should have to hunt them 
in the lonely graveyards and rap on the silent tomb to 
get answers from the dead. You know they can't say 
nothing in this case, for you've killed 'em all.' 

" Loud was the applause, and Farmer Bennett won hi& 
case." 

Stevens, Thaddeus. — A western Congressman, de- 
scribing to Stevens a township in his district, the fertility 
of its soil, the salubrity of its climate, the magnificence 
of its scenery, finished by saying that all it wanted was 
plenty of water and good society. 

" That is all they want in the lower regions" said Ste- 
vens. 

"When John Hickman said to Stevens in his last illness, 
" You are looking well," he replied, " Ah, John ! it is not 
my appearance, but my disappearance, that troubles me." 



476 WIT AND HUMOE, 

Story, Joseph. — Chief Justice Story attended a pub- 
lic dinner in Boston at which Edward Everett was pres- 
ent. Desiring to pay a delicate compliment to the latter, 
the learned judge proposed as a volunteer toast: 
"Fame follows merit where Everett goes." 
The brilliant scholar arose and responded: 
" To whatever heights judicial learning may attain in 
this country, it will never get above one Story." 

On Chancellor Kent's visit to Boston in 1823, at a din- 
ner given in his- honor, the toasts were on the chairman's 
instantaneous requisition. 

Judge Parker gave : " The happy climate of New York, 
where the moral sensibilities and intellectual energies 
are preserved long after constitutional decay has taken 
place." 

Judge Story gave: "The State of New York, where 
the law of the land has been so ably administered that it 
has become the land of the law." 

Chancellor Kent instantly replied : " The State of Mas- 
sachusetts, the land of Story as well as of song." 

Strother, Francis. — Half a century ago Strother was 
one of the brilliant lawyers of Alabama. Some bits of 
portraiture of the man are drawn from Baldwin's widely 
read and interesting " Flush Times of Alabama and Mis- 
sissippi." 

Strother was the genius of labor. His unequaled facil- 
ity in the dispatch of business surprised all who knew its 
extent. Nothing was omitted — nothing flurried over — 
nothing bore marks of haste, nothing was done out of 
time. System — order — punctuality waited upon him as 
so many servants to that patient and indomitable indus- 
try. He had a rare tact in getting at, and in getting 



BENCH AND BAR 477 

through, a thing. He saw at once the point. He never 
missed the point of the argument. He never went to 
opening the oyster at the wrong end. He never turned 
over and over a subject to find out what to do with it or 
how to commence work. He caught the run of the facts — 
moulded the scheme of his treatment of them — saw their 
right relations, value and dependence, and then started 
at once, in ready, fluent and terse English, to put them 
on paper or marshal them in speech. His power of state- 
ment was remarkable, especially of written statement. 
He could make more out of a fact than most men out of 
two; and immaterial matters he could so dove-tail and 
attach to other matters that they left an impression of a 
great deal of plausibility and pertinency. 

There was business skill in every thing he did. His 
arguments were clear, brief, pointed — never wandering, 
discursive or episodical — never over- worked, or over- 
laden, or over-elaborated. He took all the points — took 
them clearly, expressed them neatly and fully — knew 
when to press a point and when to glide over it quickly, 
and, above all — what so few know — he knew when he 
was done. 

In his own private affairs no man was more liberal and 
yielding, or less exacting or pertinacious; professionally, 
his concessions took the form of and exhausted their en- 
ergies in beneficent words, benignant seemings and gra- 
cious gestures. But his manner was inimitably munificent. 
Though he gave nothing, he went through the motions 
of giving most grandly; empty-handed, you felt that you 
were full; you mistook the filling of your ears for some 
substantial benefit to your client; there was an affluence 
of words, a lingual and manual generosity which almost 
seemed to transpose the figures on the statement which 



478 WIT AND HUMOR. 

he proposed as a settlement. With a grand self-abnega 
tion he would allow you to continue a cause when his side 
was not ready to try it, and would most blandly merely 
insist on your paying the costs, magnanimously waiving 
further advantage of your situation. He would suffer 
you to take a nonsuit with an air of kindness calculated 
to rivet a sense of eternal obligation. No man reveled 
in a more princely generosity than he when he gave away 
nothing. And to carry out the self-delusion he took with 
the air of giving a bounty. Before his manner of marvel- 
ous concession all impediments and precedence vanished. 
If he had a case at the end of the docket he always man- 
aged to get it tried first ; if the arrangement of the docket 
did not suit his convenience, his convenience changed it 
by a sort of not-before-understood but taken-for-granted 
general consent of the bar. There was such a matter-of- 
course about his polite propositions, that for a good while 
no one ever thought of resisting them; indeed, most law- 
yers, under the spell of his infatuating manners, half rec- 
ollected some sort of agreement which was never made. 
In the trial of a cause he would slip in testimony on you 
in such a cozy, easy, insinuating fashion that you were 
ruined before you could rally to oppose it. Even wit- 
nesses could not resist the graciousness and affectionate- 
ness of his manner, the confidence with which he rested 
on their presumed knowledge — they thought they must 
know what he evidently knew so well and so authentically. 

Strother had no doubts. He had passed from this 
world of shadows to a world of perfect light and knowl- 
edge. He had the rare luck of always being on the 
right side; and then he had all the points that could be 
made on that side clearly in his favor, and all that could 
be made against him were clearly wrong. He was never 
taken off his guard. If a witness swore him out of court, 



BENCH AND BAR. 479 

he could not swear him out of countenance. He ex- 
pected it. His case was better than he feared. In the 
serene confidence of unshakable faith in his cause, brick- 
bats fell on his mind like snowflakes, melting as they 
fell, and leaving no impression. If he had but one wit- 
ness, and you had six against him, long after the jury 
had ceased listening and when you concluded, he would 
mildly ask you if that was all your proof, and if you pro- 
posed going to the jury on that ? 

Sumner, Charles. — Sumner is said by his biog- 
rapher, Mr. Edward L. Pierce, to have been entirely de- 
void of humor, yet in Mr. Pierce's very interesting work 
we find this delicious little incident: 

We have heard a story that he was in his younger days 
taken dangerously sick, so suddenly that he could not be 
carried home, and lay in great agony on a couch in his 
office. The friend who was with him thought it his duty 
to intimate to him the danger of his condition, and asked 
him if he wished to do anything by way of preparation. 

" I am prepared to die," whispered Sumner, in a voice 
weak from suffering; " I have read through Calvinh In- 
stitutes in the original" 

Sutherland, Josiah. — Judge Sutherland was pro- 
verbial for his absent-mindedness, of which many instances 
occurred. The officers of his court, taking advantage of 
this weakness, occasionally played practical jokes upon 
him, which, but for his kindness of heart and genial man- 
ners, would have been perilous to them. On one occasion 
when the judge was sitting at chambers, one of his officers 
said to the others that he could get Judge Sutherland to 
sign any or Jer he wanted, no matter what the order mi^ht 



4:80 WIT AND HUMOR. 

contain. They determined to try the experiment, and 
drew the following order: 

" At a special term of the Supreme Court, held in the 

city hall, in the city of New York, this day of , 

present, Hon. Josiah Sutherland, Supreme Court Justice. 
After hearing ... of counsel for . . . , no one 
appearing in opposition thereto, it is ordered that the fol- 
lowing officers of the Supreme Court (giving their names) 
appear with the said Josiah Sutherland, justice of the 
Supreme Court, at one o'clock in the afternoon of this day, 
at Delmonico's restaurant, and partake of a champagne 
lunch at his expense; and the said officers of said Supreme 
Court as aforesaid are hereby notified that if they or any 
of them fail to obey this order they will be adjudged 
guilty of contempt of court and punished to the utmost 
extent of the law." 

This order, with others, was presented to Judge Suther- 
land, and, without examining the contents, he promptly 
signed it. When the court took a recess the officers 
huddled around him, and one of them stated to him that 
he had an important engagement at one o'clock. The 
judge said he did not know of any. The officer then 
showed him the order. He took the joke kindly and said : 

" Well, boys, the order of the court must be obeyed; no 
time must be lost." 

So they marched over to Delmonico's and had a sump- 
tuous lunch at the judge's expense. 

Tact. — " Talent," says a writer, " knows what to do, 
tact knows how to do it; talent makes a man respectable, 
tact will make him respected; talent is wealth, tact is 
ready money. For all the practical purposes of life, tact 
carries it against talent ten to one. Talent has many a 
compliment from the bench, but tact touches fees from 



BENCH AND BAR. 



481 



attorneys and clients. Talent speaks learnedly and logic- 
ally, tact triumphantly. Talent makes the world wonder 
that it gets on no faster, tact excites astonishment that 
it gets on so fast. And the secret is, that it has no weight 
to carry; it makes no false steps; it loses no time; it 
takes all hints ; and, by keeping its eye on the weather- 
cock, is able to take advantage of every wind that blows." 
As Emerson sings, — 

"Tact clinches the bargain; 
Sails out of the bay; 
Gets the vote in the Senate 
Spite of Webster or Clay." 

"It is related of Lincoln," says Mr. Donovan, in his 
bright little volume Tact in Court, " that he seemed ut- 
terly regardless of little points, holding to the core of his 
case, and winning by his liberality and fairness. In the 
trial of disputed bills, he would waive interest or forego- 
trifles, from time to time, until the close, when he would 
bend to his work of winning the main issue with a de- 
termination seldom witnessed, and, having won the jury 
by good humor, he would fasten their judgment on the 
sum he demanded. The higher one rises at the bar, the 
less is known of little, quibbling demands and defences." 

Referring to Lincoln's power and tact in jury trials,. 
Leonard Swett says: 

" As a trial lawyer he had few equals and no superiors. 
He was as hard a man to beat in a closely contested case as I 
have ever met. He was wise in knowing what to attempt 
and what to let alone. He was fair to the court, the jury, 
and his adversary; but candor compels me to say that 
he by practice learned there was power in this. He was 
candid and he was fair; but he knew how to make just 
the most of this. As he entered the trial where most 
lawyers L object, 1 he would say he ' reckoned ' it would be 
31 



482 WIT AND HUMOR. 

fair to let this in or that; and sometimes, when his adver- 
sary could not prove what Mr. Lincoln knew to be the 
truth, he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit 
the truth to be so and so. When he did object to the 
court, after he heard his objection answered, he would 
often say : ' Well, I reckon I must be wrong.' Now about 
the time he had practiced this three-quarters through a 
case, if his adversary didn't understand him, lie would 
wake up in a few minutes, finding that he had feared the 
Greeks too late — and himself jeaten. He was as wise 
as a serpent in the trial of a cause. By giving away six 
points and carrying the seventh, he carried his case, and, 
the whole case hanging on the seventh, lie traded every- 
thing off which could give him the least aid in carrying 
that." 

In an action for breach of promise of marriage, Ser- 
geant Wilkins won a verdict for the defendant, a money- 
lender of small stature, by saying to the jury: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, do you think that this en- 
chanting, this accomplished young lady would ever have 
permitted an offer of marriage to be made to her by this 
miserable atom of humanity, this stunted creature, who 
would have to stand on a sheet of paper to look over two- 
pence ? " 

A lawyer, having advertised for a young clerk, found his 
office crowded the next morning with applicants. Arrang- 
ing them in a row, he said he would tell them a story, note 
their comments, and from that judge of his choice: 

"A certain farmer," began the lawyer, " was troubled 
with a red squirrel that got through a hole into his barn 
and stole his seed corn. He resolved to kill the squirrel 
at the first opportunity. One noon, seeing him go in at 
the hole, ho took his shot-gun and fired away; the charge 
set the barn on fire." 



BENCH AND BAR 483 

" Did the barn burn down ? " asked one of the boys. 

The lawyer, without answering, went on: 

" Seeing the barn on fire, the farmer seized a pail of 
water, and ran to put the flames out." 

" Did he put them out ? " asked another. 

"As he passed inside, the door shut to and the barn was 
soon in flames. The hired girl rushed out with more 
water — " 

" Did they all burn up ? " asked another boy, eagerly. 

" Then the old lady came out, and all was confusion, 
and everybody was trying to put out the fire." 

" Did any one burn up ? " asked another. 

" There, that will do ; you have all shown great interest 
in the story," the lawyer said. 

He turned toward one bright-eyed little fellow, who 
had maintained a deep silence, and said: 

" Now, my little man, what have you to say about it ? " 

The little fellow blushed, grew uneasy, and stammered 
out: 

" I want to know what became of the squirrel ! " 

" You'll do ; the position is yours," exclaimed the law- 
yer. " You have not been switched off by a confusion 
and a barn burning, and hired girls and water pails ; you 
have kept your eye on the squirrel." 

An Illinois attorney cites an interesting trial in which 
he was engaged. The evidence was conclusive, the law 
was on his side, and when he arose to address the jury 
he thought he had the case won. He noticed, however, 
as he proceeded with his argument that one of the jury- 
men, a stolid old farmer, did not seem to be with him. 
The other eleven men had already decided the case in 
their own minds, but the farmer was stupid and obsti- 
nate. He then tried a new tack; repeated his argument 
until he came to a place where the opposing lawyer had 



484 WIT AND HUMOR. 

made an egregious error, and then leaning over to the 
old farmer, said: 

" And there, my friend, that's where he dropped his 
watermelon." 

The old farmer laughed outright, and from that mo- 
ment the case was won. 

General Barnes had the happy faculty of impressing 
his clients that justice and law were with them in all 
cases. A countryman walked into his office and said: 

" General, I have come to get your advice in a case 
that is giving me some trouble." 

"Well, what is the matter?" 

"Suppose now," said the client, "that a man had a 
fine spring of water on his land, and his neighbor living 
below him was to build a dam across a creek running 
through both their farms, and it was to back the water 
up into the other man's spring, what ought to be done?" 

" Sue him, sir, sue him by all means," said the Gen- 
eral, who always became excited in proportion to the 
aggravation of his client's wrongs. " You can recover 
heavy damages, sir. It is a most flagrant injury he has 
done you, sir, and the law will make him pay well for it. 
Just give me the case, and I'll bring the money from him ; 
and if he hasn't a good deal of property it will break 
him up, sir." 

" But stop, General," cried the terrified applicant for 
legal advice, " it's me that built the dam, and it's neigh- 
bor Jones that owns the spring, and he's threatening to 
sue me / " 

The keen law}^er hesitated but a moment before he 
tacked ship and kept on: 

" Ah ! Well, sir, you say you built a dam across that 
creek. What sort of a dam was that, sir ? " 

" It was a mill-dam." 



BENCH AND BAR. 485 

" A mill-dam for grinding grain, was it ? " 

" Yes, it was just that." 

" And it is a good neighborhood mill, is it ? " 

"So it is, sir; you may well say so." 

" And all your neighbors bring their grain there to be 
ground, do they ? " 

" Yes, sir, all but Jones." 

" Then it's a great public convenience, is it not ? " 

" To be sure it is. I would not have built it but for 
that. It's so far to any other mill, sir." 

" And now," said the old lawyer, "you tell me that that 
man Jones is complaining just because the water from 
your dam happens to back up into his little spring, and 
he is threatening to sue you. Well, all I have to say is, 
let him sue, and he'll rue the day he ever thought of it, 
as sure as my name is Barnes." 

Curran is said to have received a call, before he left his 
bed one morning, from a gentleman whom he had cross- 
examined with needless cruelty and unjustifiable insolence 
on the previous day. 

" Sir ! " said this irate man, presenting himself in Cur- 
ran's bed-room, and rousing him from slumber, "I am the 
gintleman you insulted yesterday in His Majesty's court 
of justice, in the presence of the whole county, and I am 
here to thrash you soundly." 

Thus speaking he raised a horsewhip to strike Curran, 
when the latter quickly said: 

" You don't mean to strike a man when he's down ?" 

"No, bedad; I'll just wait till you've got out of bed 
and then I'll give it to you sharp and fast." 

Curran's eye twinkled mischievously as he rejoined: 

"If that's the case, I'll lie here all day." 



486 WIT AND HUMOR. 

So amused was the visitor with this humorous an- 
nouncement that he dropped his horsewhip, and, dismiss- 
ing anger with a hearty laugh, asked Curran to shake 
hands with him. 

Attorney B was concerned for the defendant in 

the action of ejectment of Barley v. Stiffler. The land in 
dispute, adjoining Barley's piece, had been farmed for 
fifty years by Stiffler, who had taken out a warrant for it, 
but never had his survey returned. This neglect, Barley 
supposed, would be fatal to Stiffler's title, and he got out 
another warrant, and had his survey made and regularly 
returned. The sympathy of the court, bar and audience 

was with honest old Stiffler, and B made one of his 

best speeches to the jury. In the course of his remarks 
he described Barley standing in his own door, viewing 
and coveting the land : 

" He saw, gentlemen of the jury, that it was good for 
rye, good for corn, good for wheat, and he thought that 
it would be good for barley too." 

The right chord was struck, and a burst of applause 
followed which the court did not appear very anxious to 
restrain. A verdict was returned for Stiffler. 

James O'Reilly, an eminent Canadian lawyer, repre- 
sented the plaintiff in the trial of a civil suit involving 
$2,000 damages. In his address to the jury, he said: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, I am a plain, practical man, 
and do not wish to impose upon your time or insult your 
intelligence with useless verbiage or specious arguments. 
Let us look at this matter in the light of common-sense. 
Suppose that one of your number has a horse to sell (here 
the jury roused themselves), and I wish to buy him. I 
offer you $100, you ask $150. We cannot agree; so we 



BENCH AND BAR. 487 

call in some honest neighbor — like your worthy foreman — 
and ask him to decide between us, and do the fair thing. 
He splits the difference, and makes it $125. Now apply 
your plain good sense to the present case on the same 
just principle. We claim $2,000. The defendant will not 
give us anything. Do } T our duty as between man and 
man. I have all confidence in you." 

He sat down, and in a few minutes the jury returned 
a verdict for the plaintiff for $1,000, which was their idea 
of the happy medium between nothing and $2,000. 

A prominent Georgia judge, very democratic, both in 
politics and religion, especially so in the latter, was in at- 
tendance on the Superior Court. The Presbyterians of 
the place, headed by their zealous and energetic minister, 
were at that time actively engaged in an effort to build 
a new house of worship. The Reverend Mr. Collins was 
enlisted in the good cause, and never let an opportunity 
slip without presenting his subscription list to all whom 
he might meet. One day when court adjourned, as the 
judge was passing out of the court-house door, the rever- 
end gentleman touched him on the shoulder and asked 
him to step aside a moment: 

" This is Judge , I believe," said Collins. 

" It is," said the judge. 

" We are engaged in endeavoring to build a new house 
of worship. Perhaps this (handing the subscription list) 
will inform you my object better than I can tell you." 

Here the judge looked very professional, took out his 
spectacles, examined the heading of the list critically, and 
for a moment seemed engaged in profound thought; then 
turning to the expectant parson, the judge, with a sly 
twinkle of the eye and the blandest smile imaginable, 
remarked, " that will hind them, sir, — that will bind them ; 
no doubt about it." 



488 WIT AND HUMOR 

This took the reverend gentleman a little aback. But 
rallying again, he renewed the attack: 

" But, judge, you don't understand me ; I want you to 
help us. "We are going to raise — " 

" Ah ! " said the judge, " You are going to have a rais- 
ing — a house raising, are you? Well, just let me know 
when it is, and I will send up three or four hands with 
pleasure." 

Here the minister's countenance exhibited a good deal 
of disgust, and he appeared to be perfectly bewildered 
at what seemed the judge's stupidity. " Why," said he, 
"judge, it's a brick house we want." 

" A brick house, is it? " said the judge; " a brick house ? 
Won't a log house do as well? Several years ago we 
built a log house in our community for religious pur- 
poses — some cut the logs, some hewed them, some split 
the boards, some raised the house, and some covered it — 
and the Lord has never made any complaint against it 
yet. If you'll build a log house, and the Lord complains, 
I'll head your subscription list for a brick one." 

The parson gave in, and left. 

Of Sergeant Parry, a famous English advocate, it is 
said: "If he did not know something personally of each 
one of the twelve men he set himself to convince or ca- 
jole, he worked on a set of general principles, the result 
of vast experience, and he was seldom at fault. Tact he 
had in a large measure: the tact which consisted in not 
pressing a point where he saw the judge or jury were 
against him ; in not bullying witnesses ; in not wrangling 
with the bench or with his ' friend ' on the other side ; 
above all, in not running counter to any sympathies or 
antipathies of the jury. The first time you saw him you 
thought you had at last found a lawyer who really had 
equally at heart the interests of his client and the inter- 
ests of justice." 



BENCH AND BAR. 489 

Harry Erskine (brother of Lord Erskine) mistaking, on 
one occasion, the side for which he was retained, ad- 
dressed the jury with great force against his client, who 
writhed with alarm and astonishment. At length, as the 
erring advocate was about resuming his seat, the client 
succeeded in getting a note into his hands, telling him 
he had been arguing on the wrong side. Without the 
slightest embarrassment he turned to the jury and said: 

" Gentlemen, such are the arguments which the speaker 
on the other side will address to you. I shall now show 
you how worthless they are." 

He then tore to pieces all the reasoning he had brought 
forward. 

James Scarlett, the great English barrister, noted for 
his tact in examining witnesses, had a twinkling expres- 
sion of sagacity in his look, and a humorous aspect which 
told amazingly with jurors. After a case had apparently 
been shattered by the witnesses and argument of his ad- 
versary, Scarlett would rise and quietly begin: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, I am quite sure that, like all 
the rest of us, you will have been overpowered and fasci- 
nated by the eloquence of the speech to which we have 
just listened with such delight. Let me now endeavor in 
my prosaic way to draw you down from the empyrean 
to which you have been lifted by my learned brother." 

Then bit by bit the arguments of the predecessor were 
ruthlessly stripped of verbiage, and their worthlessness 
exposed in its unadorned nakedness. 

His success with juries was almost supernatural. The 
Duke of Wellington said of him : " When Scarlett is ad- 
dressing a jury there are thirteen jurymen." As a writer 
observes: "What the duke meant was, that Scarlett, sup- 
pressing the advocate, talked to them as one of themselves, 
•and as having at heart the same object — the discovery of 



490 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the truth. He did this so completely that the sense of his 
superiority was lost, and no suspicion broke upon them 
that they were under a spell woven by a master of his art." 
After the breaking up of the court on the last day of 
a long Yorkshire Assize, Wightman, then at the bar, 
found himself walking in the crowd cheek-by-jowl with a 
countryman whom he had seen serving day after day on 
the jury. Liking the look of the man, he got into con- 
versation with him, and, finding that this was his first at- 
tendance at the assizes, asked him what he thought of the 
leading counsel. " Well," was the reply, " that Lawyer 
Brougham be a wonderful man; he can talk, he can; but 
I don't think nowt of Lawyer Scarlett." " Indeed ! " ex- 
claimed Wightman, " you surprise me. Why, you have 
been giving him all the verdicts." " Oh, there's nothing 
in that," said the juror; "he be so lucky, you see, he be 
always on the right side." 

Tenterden, Lord. — An involuntary witticism of Lord 
Tenterden — a great jurist, but by no means a humorist — 
shows strikingly the force of judicial habit. He was so- 
thoroughly accustomed to keeping himself and everyone 
else to the precise matter in hand that once during a circuit 
dinner, having asked a county magistrate if he would 
take some venison, and receiving what he deemed to be 
an evasive reply: "Thank you, my lord, I am to take 
boiled chicken," he sharply retorted : 

" That is no answer to my question. I ask you again 
if you will take venison, and will trouble you to say ' Yes ' 
or ' No ' without further prevarication." 

Tenterden, though a man of fine imagination, and a 
poet, would tolerate no undue display of learning and 
sentiment at the bar : 

" It is asserted in Aristotle's Khetoric," argued a pedan- 
tic barrister to his lordship. 



BENCH AND BAR 49 1 

" I don't want to hear what is asserted in Aristotle's 
Rhetoric," interposed his lordship. 

" It is laid down in the Pandects of Justinian," con- 
tinued the barrister. 

" Where have you got to now ? " 

" It is a principle of the civil law." 

" Oh, sir, we have nothing to do with civil law in this 
court." 

Lord Campbell insists that this pun of Tenterden, if it 
can be called one, was unintentional; like that of Black- 
stone, who remarks in his Commentaries that " landmarks 
on the seashore are often of signal service to navigators." 

Testimony.— "Larry" in court— from "Kory O'More," 
by Samuel Lover — is a humorous gem from the Green 
Old Isle. 

Counsel : You say that the prisoner at the bar and the 
late Mr. Scrubbs — 

The counsel for the defence here interposed, and said 
he objected to the term, the late Mr. Scrubbs, as it was 
assuming the fact he was dead, which was not proven. 
The examination then proceeded. 

Counsel : The prisoner at the bar and the late — I beg 
pardon — Mister Scrubbs were the last to leave the " Black 
Bull" on that day? Witness: Yis, sir. 

Counsel: How did they go ? Witness: They wint out 
o' the door, sir. 

Counsel: I don't suppose they went out of the window. 
I mean, did they leave about the same time ? Witness : 
They wint together, sir. 

Counsel : Both out of the door at once ? Witness : No. 
Mr. Scrubbs wint first. 

Counsel: And the prisoner after ? Witness: Yis. 

Counsel: Then he followed him ? Witness: Yis. 



492 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Counsel: You observe, gentlemen of the jury, Mr. 
Scrubbs went firsts and the prisoner followed him. Wit- 
ness: Why, you wouldn't have him go before the gin tie- 
man ! 

Counsel: Silence, sir! Kemembar that, gentlemen — 
he followed Mr. Scrubbs. 

There was a good deal more of examination which it 
would be uninteresting to record; and after the landlord 
of the " Black Bull " had been bullied and tormented as 
much as the counsel chose, he said " You may go down, 
sir." 

Larry Finnegan, delighted to escape, scrambled from 
the witness's chair, and was rushing off the stand, when 
Kory's counsel interposed and said, " I beg your pardon — 
don't go down yet." 

" Oh ! " said the counsel for the crown, " you want to 
cross-examine him, do you ? " 

" I believe I have a right, sir," was the young barrister's 
reply. 

" Why, sure, what crosser examination can you gi' me 
than tho one I got ? " said poor Finnegan. 

" Sit down, sit down, my man," said the counsel, en- 
couragingly. " Now, don't be in a hurry, don't be alarmed ; 
take your time, and answer me quietly a few questions I 
shall ask. You say some conversation passed between 
the prisoner and Mr. Scrubbs at your house ? Witness : 
Yis, sir — they wor spakin' togither for some time. 

Counsel: I think you mentioned that Mr. Scrubbs 
asked the prisoner was he going home ? Witness : He 
did, sir. 

Counsel: And the prisoner was going home ? Witness : 
Yis, sir. 

Counsel: Mr. Scrubbs' road home lay the same way, I 
believe? Witness: It did, sir. 



BENCH AND BAR. 493 

Counsel: Then he and the prisoner could not help going 
the same road ? Witness : They could not, sir. 

Counsel: Mr. Scrubbs went out of the door first ? "Wit- 
ness: Yis, sir. 

Counsel: And the prisoner after? Witness: Yis, sir. 

Counsel: Immediately? Witness: That minit. 

Counsel : Then, what do you mean by saying he fol- 
lowed him? Witness: I mane, he folly'd him the way 
a poor man would folly a gintleman, of course. 

Counsel: I beg your attention, gentlemen of the jury, 
to this explanation of the witness's meaning, upon which 
the opposite counsel has put a false construction. 

Was the crow-bar you gavs the prisoner his or yours ? 
Witness: It was his, sir; he lint it to me, and kem that 
day to ax for it. 

Counsel: He came to ask for it, did he? — then it was 
for that particular purpose he went to your house that 
day ? Witness : It was, sir. 

Counsel : Before he saw Mr. Scrubbs at all ? Witness : 
Yis, sir. 

Counsel : I beg you to remember this also, gentlemen 
of the jury. You may go down, witness. 

Larry Finnegan again attempted to descend from the 
stand, but was interrupted by the counsel for the prosecu- 
tion, and the look of despair which the countenance of 
mine host of the " Black Bull " assumed was almost ludi- 
crous. " Is it more you want o' me ? " said he. 

Counsel: A few questions. Sit down. 

Larry scratched his head and squeezed his hat harder 
than he had done before, and resumed his seat in bitter- 
ness of spirit ; but his answers having latterly all gone 
smoothly, he felt rather more self-possessed than he had 
done under his previous examination by the prosecuting 
counsel, and his native shrewdness was less under the 
control of the novel situation in which he was placed. 



494 WIT AND HUMOR 

The bullying barrister, as soon as the witness was seated, 
began in a thundering tone thus: 

Counsel: Now, my fine fellow, you say that it was for 
the particular purpose of asking for his crow-bar that the 
prisoner went to your house. Witness: I do. 

Counsel: By virtue of your oath? Witness: By vartu 
o' ray oath. 

Counsel (slapping the table fiercely with his hand): 
Now, sir, how do you know he came for that purpose? 
Answer me that, sir ! 

Witness: Faith, thin, I'll tell you. When he came into 
the place that morning, it was the first thing he ax'd for; 
and by the same token, the way I remimber it is, that 
when he ax'd for the crow-bar he lint me, some one 
standin' by ax'd what I could want with a crow-bar, and 
Eory O'More with that said it w r asn't me at all, but the 
misthress wanted it (Mrs. Finnegan, I mane). "And 
what would Mrs. Finnegan want wid it?" says the man. 
" Why," says Eory, "she makes the punch so sthrong that 
she bint the spoon sthrivin' to stir it, and so she bor- 
rowed the crow-bar to mix the punch." 

A negro was arrested for stealing a hog from Mr. Hen- 
derson, of Tennessee. At the hearing Henderson took 
the stand, and the justice of the peace began: 

" Is your name Thomas Henderson ? " 

"Of co'se; didn't reckon I'd bin changin' names, did 
yo', squar?" 

" Live in this yere town ? " 

" Sartin, I do. That's a powerfully foolish question to 
ask me." 

" Beside in this yere county and state, I take it." 

" Search me, but of co'se I do ! " exclaimed the witness. 
" I was bo'n right yere and never wandered fifty miles 
away, an' yo' know it, and the law knows it too." 



BENCH AND BAE. 



495 



" On the 5th day of this month were yo' in possession 
of a certain spotted hog, weighing about one hundred and 
sixty pounds, and hevin' a kink in his tail ? " 

"Of co'se I was; what's all this beatin' around fur, 
squar ? Why don't yo' go ahead and let me sw'ar to the 
killin'andfindin'?" 

"Law is law, Mr. Henderson, and we must go 'cordin' 
to law or we can't make a case. Was yo' out in the woods 
the afternoon of the 5th ? " 

"I was." 

" Gettin' chestnuts ? " 

" Yes." 

"Find any?" 

"'Bout half a bushel; but what's the matter now? 
What has chestnuts got to do with that hog ? " 

" Steady, Tom. Is yo'r eyesight good ? " 

"Jess h'ar him. Squar Taylor! that ain't no law! 
That's only foolin' 'round like a man lookin' up a coon 
tree when the coon is somewhar' else." 

" How about yo'r hearin' ? " continued his honor. 

" Say, squar'," said the witness rising, and pounding 
his fist on the desk, " this haint no case whar' somebody 
traded mewls, but it's a case whar' that pesky Ave Salter 
stole my hog, and is yere to be tried fur it. Now yo' quit 
fussin' and go 'cordin to law, or I'll walk right off." 

" Wall, Tom, I reckon we've made a good 'nuff case," 
said his honor, as he closed the law book before him, 
" and Abe Salter is sentenced to three months in jail, and 
will be took thar' right off ! " 

An action to recover damages was brought against the 
owner of a wagon, which, by the reckless driving of the 
wagoner, had forced a donkey against a wall, and there 
pressed the poor creature to death. The principal wit- 
ness for the plaintiff was the driver of the donkey, who, 



496 WIT AND HUMOR. 

feeling himself very much browbeaten by the defend- 
ant's counsel, became exceedingly nervous and confused in 
his evidence. He was several times reprimanded by the 
judge for not looking in the faces of those interrogating 
him. The poor fellow's embarrassment increased upon 
every reproof, and the opposing counsel was particularly 
severe with him, several times saying: 

"Hold up your head, witness; look up! Can't you look 
as I do?" 

" Nay, sir," replied the countryman, with perfect sim- 
plicity, "I can't — you squint." 

The poor harassed witness was next asked by the sup- 
porting counsel, Sergeant Cockle, to describe the local 
situations of the several parties concerned — their rela- 
tive positions at the time of the accident and death of 
the poor donkey ; where the wagon was, and where the 
unfortunate animal stood, etc. At last, summoning up 
his courage, he hesitatingly began: 

" Weel, my lord jooclge, I'll tell you how it happened 
as best I can. First of all," turning to Cockle, " you are 
the wall." 

" Very good," said Cockle. 

" Ay, you are the wall," repeated the witness ; and then 
changing his position in the court to another spot, he 
added, " and now, I am the wagon." 

" Yery well," observed the judge; "proceed." 

" Yees," he repeated, " I am the wagon," and with a 
low bow, added, " your lordship's the donkey." 

This evidence, though perhaps not quite satisfactory to 
the judge, was conclusive. 

Magistrate : " The evidence shows that you threw a 
brick at the man." 

Mrs. McDuff: "An' it shows more than that, your 
honor. It shows that I hit him." 



BENCH AND BAR. 497 

"Is he fatally wounded, officer?" said the judge. 

" Two av the wounds is fatal, sor, but the third is not, 
an' if we can lave him rest quiet for a f while, I think he 
wud come 'round all right. 

A striking definition occasionally crops out in the tes- 
timony of witnesses. In a New Jersey horse case, a 
negro witness was called to explain the difference between 
a box-stall and a common stall. Straightening up, and 
pointing to the square inclosure where the judge sat, he 
said: 

" Dat ar's what I call a box-stall, dere whar dat old 
hoss is sittin'." 

The following story comes from a criminal trial in the 
court of Queen's Bench at Montreal: 

The prosecution was for nuisance, and was brought 
nominally by Her Majesty against the owners of one of 
the largest iron works in that city. The residents in the 
neighborhood had subscribed funds and retained counsel, 
a true bill was found, and the case proceeded for trial. 
Householders told dreadful tales of the damage done to 
property by the immense quantities of smoke emitted 
from the low chimneys of the defendants' furnaces ; house- 
wives testified that their washing was constantly spoiled 
when hung out to dry in their yards or on their roofs; 
and medical men swore to the deleterious effects of the 
smoke on the public health. Toward the conclusion of 
the case, a witness from the Emerald Isle went on the 
stand. He owned a small property close to the rolling- 
mills, and thus proceeded: 

" Yer anner and gintlemin av the jury, oi will tell me 

shtory in me own way. Oi live nixt door to a party be 

the name av G-rogan — Jerry Grogan, yer anner — a da- 

cint married man wid a woife and four shlips av bhoys. 

32 



498 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Wan day whin the chimneys av the rollin '-mills was puf- 
fin' out shmoke like the divil, oi hears a terrible row goin' 
on in Jerry Grogan's house, shoutin' and schreamin' and 
yellin 1 . I goes up to the door, and sez oi, ' let me in.' 
'Come in, for God's sake,' sez Mrs. Grogan; ' Jerry is 
killin' me,' sez she. And in oi goes, and sees Jerry wal- 
lupin' the woife. 'Jerry,' sez oi, 'what are ye batin' the 
woife for ? ' sez oi. Sez Jerry to me, sez he, ' she's got 
niggers in the house,' sez he. ' Niggers ! ' sez oi. ' Yes,' 
sez he. 'Where is the niggers? 'sez oi. 'In the room 
beyant,' sez Jerry. And so oi goes into the room beyant, 
and sings out to Jerry, ' Jerry, ye're a fool,' sez oi. ' What 
for ? ' sez he. ' Beca'se,' sez oi, ' thim's no niggers,' sez oi. 
* Well, what the divil are they ? ' sez he. ' Jerry,' sez oi, 
' ye're mad,' sez oi. And, yer anner and gintlemin av the 
jury, thim niggers was Jerry's own children, begrimed by 
the shmoke from the defendants' fachtory chimneys" 

" Witness," sternly said the judge, " do you swear that 
this extraordinary story is true ? " 

" Oi do, yer anner." 

" That will do." 

Judge, to counsel : Allow me to examine this witness. 
I think I can get at the truth. Now, MacTurk, you say 
you know all about this burglary. State in as few words 
as possible what you saw and heard. 

MacTurk: Well, you know, I got up that mornin' at 
five o'clock and I dhressed meself — 

Judge: Stop a moment. This burglary took place at 
three o'clock in the afternoon. What has five o'clock in 
the morning to do with that ? 

MacTurk : Sure, that was the time I got up, your honor. 
I'll explain. 

Judge: We don't want explanations. Go on with the 
evidence. 



BENCH AND BAR. 499 

MacTurk: As I said before, I got up that morning at 
five o'clock and I lit the fire — no — I made a mistake; I 
niver light it till I've had a dhrink. 

Judge (sternly): We don't care to hear anything about 
that, sir. 

MacTurk: Sure, I know ye don't, yer honor — why 
should ye ? Me wife sez to me — 

Judge (emphatically): Never mind what your wife 
said. 

MacTurk: I niver do, yer honor; I pay no attention 
to her, whatever. I lit me pipe — 

Judge: Never mind your pipe. 

MacTurk: And I went down to the corner and I got a 
sixteen-to-one — 

Judge : A what ? (Sensation in the court.) 

MacTurk : It's a dhrink, yer honor. They put sixteen 
different things in it an' if ye took the second one it would 
knock ye stiff. 

Judge (rising angrily) : I would like to know how the 
counsel for the prosecution dares — I say dares — to put 
such a witness on the stand. This person ought to be in 
a lunatic asylum. 

Counsel (with dignity): Your honor, this is a most im- 
portant witness. In the interests of justice, I beg you to 
give him one more chance. 

Judge (becoming calm): I will try him once more. 
Now, MacTurk, be very careful to tell us only the facts 
that bear on this robbery. 

MacTurk: Yer honor, I got up that mornin'— 

Judge (thunderingly) : Stop! 

Counsel (to the rescue): Where were you, MacTurk, at 
three o'clock that day ? 

MacTurk : I was goin' down past the lot by Brown's 
factory. 

Counsel: What did you hear ? 



500 WIT AND HUMOR 

MacTurk : Whin I was passin' the board fence some 
thin' inside said "thoo" and gev a sneeze, and thin some- 
thin' ran away. I didn't see it an' it didn't see me. 

Judge (interrupting): How does this bear on the rob- 
bery? 

MacTurk: Sure, yer honor, that was the time the place 
was robbed. 

Judge : Well, did you see any person ? 

MacTurk : Sorra a one at all, yer honor, but as I said 
before, I heard somethin' — 

Judge (despairingly) : Something f What do you think 
it was ? 

MacTurk: Divil a know, yer honor, it might have been 
a goat. But the place was robbed, for sure, and I think 
that was the one that done it. 

In a negligence case the judge and counsel were trying 
to extract from the witness — a good-humored Irishman — 
something about the speed of a train. 

" Was it going fast ? " asked the judge. 

" Aw, yis, it were." 

"How fast?" 

" Oh, purty fasht, yer honor." 

" Was it as fast as a man can run ? " 

" Aw, yis," glad that the basis for an analogy was sup- 
plied. "As fasht as two min kin run." 

Thesiger, Sir Frederick. — Thesiger, afterwards 
Lord Chelmsford, while engaged in a trial, objected to 
the irregularity of a learned sergeant who repeatedly 
put leading questions in examining his witnesses. 

" I have a right," maintained the sergeant doggedly, 
" to deal with my witnesses as I please." 

"To that I offer an objection," retorted Frederick; 
"you may deal as you like; but you shan't lead." 



BENCH AND BAR. 501 

Sergeant Channell, who was in the habit of dropping 
his h's, and Thesiger were trying a case about a ship 
called the Helen. Every time the former mentioned the 
vessel, he called it the Ellen. Every time the other coun- 
sel mentioned her, he called her the Helen. At last the 
judge, with a quaint gravity, said, "Stop! what was the 
name of the ship? I have it on my notes the Ellen and 
the Helen. Which is it ? " 

" Oh, my lud," said Thesiger, in his blandest and most 
fastidious manner, " the ship was christened the Helen, 
but she lost her 'h' in the chops of the Channell. 

Thurlow, Lord.— During a debate on Lord Sand- 
wich's administration of Greenwich Hospital, the Duke 
of Grafton taunted Thurlow, then Lord Chancellor, on 
his humble origin. Thurlow rose from the woolsack, and, 
advancing towards the duke, declared he was amazed at 
his grace's speech. "The noble duke," he cried, in a 
burst of oratorical scorn, " cannot look before him, be- 
hind him, nor on either side of him without seeing, 
some noble peer who owes his seat in this House to his 
successful exertions in the profession to which I belong. 
Does he not feel that it is as honorable to owe it to these 
as to being the accident of an accident f " 

Thurlow's summing up of Lord Mansfield: " A surpris- 
ing man; ninety-nine times out of a hundred he was 
right in his opinions and decisions ; and when once in a 
hundred times he was wrong, ninety-nine men out of a 
hundred would not discover it." 

Thurlow was notorious for his drunkenness, insolence 
and profanity. On one occasion a young barrister, who 
had to prove that a certain party was dead, was inter- 
rupted by Thurlow with the rude explanation: "Bah! 



502 WIT AND HUMOR. 

that's no proof!" The lawyer sadly proceeded: "My 
lord, it is very hard that you will not believe me. I 
knew him well to his last hour; I saw him dead and in 
his coffin. My lord, he was my client." " Good heavens, 
sir," exclaimed the clown chancellor, " Why didn't you 
tell me that before? I should not have doubted the fact 
one moment; for I think nothing can be more likely to 
kill a man than to have you for an attorney." 

Thurston, John M. — Some years ago an affray 
among the miners of the West resulted in murder, and 
United States Senator Thurston of Nebraska, believing 
the accused to have been innocent in intention, took up 
his case and greatly mitigated the lad's punishment. Six 
month afterwards a man, armed to the teeth, appeared 
in Thurston's office. 

"Be you Squire Thurston?" 

"Yes." 

" Be you the man that defended Jack Bailey at court?" 

The Senator, thinking his last hour had come, again 
answered, "Yes." 

" Well, I'm Jack Bailey's pardner, and I've come to 
pay you. I haven't got any money, but I'm a man of 
honor. Anybody in town you don't like ? " 

As the Senator smilingly disclaimed any thirst for 
booty or blood, the caller insisted incredulously, " Put on 
your hat, Squire, and just walk down the street. See 
anybody you don't like, throw up your thumb and I'll 
pop him." 

Tipstaff. — An old court crier, deaf as a beetle, was in 
the habit of calling witnesses (whose names he generally 
managed to get wrong) from the second-story window of 
the court-house, in a voice heard for a square or more. 



BENCH AND BAR, 503 

On one occasion the presence of a witness named Ara- 
bella Hanks was needed. The crier, like a parrot nod- 
ding on his perch, was roused from his slumber by an 
order from the court to call the witness. Looking anx- 
iously at the judge, with his hand at his ear, in order to 
catch the sound correctly, he said: 

" "What, your honor ? " 

" Call Arabella Hanks," said the judge. 

Still in doubt, the poor crier said again, with a puzzled 
look: 

" What, your honor ? " 

" Call Arabella Hanks, crier, and delay the business of 
the court no longer! " said the judge, much provoked. 

The old crier, with a countenance indicating doubt and 
desperation, proceeded to the window, and in his loudest 
voice called : 

" Yaller Belly Shanks ! Yaller Belly Shanks ! Yaller 
Belly Shanks ! Come into court ! " 

The seriousness of the court-room was convulsively dis- 
turbed by the laughter caused by the crier, who, in an- 
swer to the court as to whether or not the witness an- 
swered, said, "No, your honor; I don't believe there is 
such a person in the county, for I've lived here forty 
years, and I've never hderd of him before." 

" What side is the gentleman on ? " asked a stranger 
who had been listening for two hours to a lawyer argu- 
ing a case. 

"I don't know," replied the tipstaff; "he hasn't com- 
mitted himself yet." 

A Galway tipstaff, questioned as to whether he had 
spoken to the jury during the night, replied: 

" No, my lord. They kept calling out for me to bring 
them whiskey, but I always said, ' Gentlemen of the jury, 



504 WIT AND HUMOR. 

it is my duty to tell you that I'm sworn not to spake to 
you.' " 

Tipstaff: What is your Christian name? 
Witness: Solomon Isaacs. 

I heard a judge his tipstaff call 

And say, " Sir, I desire 
You go forthwith and search the Hall 

And send to me the crier." 
"And search, my Lord, in vain, I may" — 

The tipstaff gravely said — 
"The crier cannot cry to-day, 

Because his wife is dead." 

Justice of the Peace Ford, of Martinez, California, who 
held that distinguished office at an early day, thought it 
essential to the dignity of his tribunal that it should be 
formally opened by constabulary proclamation. On one 
occasion the constable, feeling more than usually well, 
opened court in these stirring accents: 

" Hear ye ! Hear ye ! the Honorable Justice's Court of 
Martinez is now open, pursuant to adjournment. Every- 
body will come to order, and everybody, whether plaint- 
iffs or defendants, shall have fair play and an equal show ! " 

The justice called the constable to him, and officially 
rebuked him: 

" What do you mean by such talk as that ? What will 
become of my business if I give the defendant an equal 
show with the plaintiff? I am not safe with you here." 

Thereafter the constable's formula was shorter. 

Townshend, Charles. — When told that a newly- 
elected member of Parliament had written a work on 
logic and grammar, Townshend asked : 

" Why does he come here where he will hear nothing 
of either?" 



BENCH AND BAR. 505 

Townshend's brother was superseded as lord lieutenant 
of Ireland by Lord Harcourt, who, arriving unexpectedly 
in Dublin at three o'clock in the morning, found Town- 
shend at a drinking party with some friends. Nothing 
abashed, he said to Sir Harcourt: 

"Your lordship has certainly come among us rather 
unexpectedly, but you must admit that you did not find 
us napping." 

Travers, William R.— The bright sayings and gen- 
tle stammer of Travers, of the New York bar, are widely 
known. 

One of his best Ion mots was inspired by the sight of 
the Siamese twins. After carefully examining the mys- 
terious ligature that had bound them together from birth, 
he looked up blankly at them and said : " B-b-br-brothers, 
I presume?" 

Travers went to a dog-fancier's to buy a rat-terrier. 

" Is she a g-g-good ratter ? " asked Travers, as he poked 
a little shivering pup with his cane. 

"Yes, sir; splendid. I'll show you how he'll go for a 
rat," said the dog-fancier, and he put him in a box with 
a big rat. As the rat made one dive and laid out the 
frightened terrier in a second, Travers said: "I say, 
Johnny, w-w-what'll ye t-t-take for the r-r-rat?" 

Henry Clews, the banker, during a talk with Travers, 
remarked that he was a self-made man. 

" W-w-what d-did you s-say, Mr. Clews ? " 

" I say with pride, Mr. Travers, that I am a self-made 
man — that I made myself — " 

" Hold, H-henry," interrupted Travers, " w- while you 
were m-m-making yourself, why the deuce d-did-didn't 
you p-put some more hair on the t-top of your h-head ? " 



506 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Travers went into a bird-fancier's in Centre street to 
buy a parrot. 

" H-h-have you got a-a-all kinds of b-b-birds ? " 

" Yes sir, all kinds," said the fancier. 

"I w-w-want to b-buy a p-p-parrot." 

"Well, here is a beauty. See what glittering plum- 
age ! " 

"I-i-is he a g-g-good t-talker?" 

" If he can't talk better than you can I'll give him to 
you." William bought the parrot. 

"Why, Mr. Travers," said a lady, "you stammer more 
in New York than you did in Baltimore." 
" B-b-bigger place," stammered Travers. 

Travers met a man who told him that he had been 
cured of stuttering, and he gave Travers the recipe: 

"You have only to wh-wh-wh-wh-ew (whistle) before 
every wh-wh-wh-ew word ; that is what k-k-k-k- (whistle) 
cured my infirmity." 

Underwood, William H.— Judge Underwood, of 
Georgia, had a keen sense of the humorous. 

" Don't you think," said an attorney to the judge, " that 
Jim Pearson is the greatest liar you ever saw ? " 

" I should be sorry to say that of Brother Pearson," 
replied his honor, " but he certainly wrestles harder with 
the truth than any other lawyer on the circuit." 

When Underwood had charged the jury, it was exceed- 
ingly dangerous for defendant's counsel to ask for addi- 
tional instructions. Attorney Glenn had been defending 
a strapping big town-boy charged with assault upon a 
smaller boy. The big boy had been imposing upon little 
fellows, and one of them hit him with a switch and ran. 



BENCH AND BAR. 507 

The big boy pursuing him threw a stone, cutting a gash 
in his head, and laying him up for a week or two. The 
judge charged the law fairly, and then asked if there was 
any other charge that counsel desired. 

"I believe your honor omitted to charge that self- 
defence may justify an assault," said Glenn. 

" Yes," said the judge, straightening himself up — " yes, 
gentleman, there is such a law, and if you believe from 
the evidence that this great, double-jointed, big-fisted 
young gentleman was actuated by fear and self-defence 
when he ran after that poor, little, puny, tallow-faced 
boy, and, because he couldn't overtake him, picked up a 
rock big enough to knock down a steer and threw it at 
him and knocked him senseless, then you can find for the 
defendant. Any other charge, Brother Glenn ? " 

" I believe not," said Glenn. 

Underwood was once on his way, by rail, from Chatta- 
nooga to Atlanta, and the passengers were considering 
what hotels they should go to on their arrival. One of 
the party said : 

"Let's go to Lloyd's; he's a Know Nothing." 
" Oh," said the judge, "I shall stop at Thompson's; he 
knows little enough for me." 

Underwood was a staunch Clay Whig, but his son John 
was continually changing his politics. 

" What are John's politics ? " asked a friend. 

"Keally," said the judge, "I can't tell you; I haven't 
seen the boy since breakfast." 

John applied to the judge for a letter of recommenda- 
tion to Governor Crawford, of Georgia. It was imme- 
diately given, and, sure of his game, John put off to 
Milled geville; but knowing his father's eccentricities, he 



508 WIT AND HUMOR 

thought it prudent to open the letter, and, to his astonish- 
ment, read: 

" My Dear Governor: This will be handed you by my 
son John. He has the greatest thirst for an office, with 
the least capacity to fill one, of any boy you ever saw. 

" Sincerely yours, 

" William H. Underwood." 
John subsequently ranked high among the eminent 
lawyers of his state. 

Van Buren, John.— The neat, crisp witticisms of 
Yan Buren, ex-attorney-general of New York, are pro- 
verbial. He once sauntered into court, and seated him- 
self beside a friend who was conducting an important 
suit. After several questions had been put and excep- 
tions taken, Yan Buren, thinking that the ruling of the 
court was a little odd, asked, in his peculiarly quiet way: 

"Who is on the other side of this case besides the judge?" 

Yan Buren was defending a prisoner in the criminal 
court. The prosecuting counsel — of small calibre, but im- 
mense bore — indulged in unnecessary personalities, and 
finally lost his case. This so chagrined him that he said 
to his courtly opponent in tones excited and angry: 

" Mr. Yan Buren, I should like to know if there is any 
case so paltry, or criminal so despicable, that you would 
not undertake to defend him ? " 

" Well, I don't know," replied Yan Buren; " what have 
you been doing ? " 

One of Yan Buren's first cases was McPherson v. Bath- 
bone, in which he appeared for the plaintiff and obtained 
a verdict. He related with infinite zest the result of his 
cross-examination of an Irish witness from Hudson who 
testified in the case : 

" Where do you live, sir ? " 



BENCH AND BAR. 509 

4 My home is at Hudson." 

"When did you come to Albany?" 

"A day before yesterday, and one day before that, I 
am thinking." 

" And how did you come, sir ? " 

"And it is how did I come that ye are after wanting 
to know ? " 

" Yes, that is precisely what I want to know." 

" Well, you see I am here ; what odds does it make 
how I came ? " 

" I want you to tell me how you got here, sir — did you 
come by land ? " 

"No,' I didn't." 

" By water ? " 

"No, I didn't." 

"Now, sir, if you neither came by land or by water, I 
want you to tell me how you did get here." 

" I came afoot, yer honor. Why don't you get at the 
' English ' of it, when ye ask questions ? They say ye are 
larned in the English as yer father is before ye, although 
he is a Dutchman." 

"The Irishman turned the laugh against me," said 
Van Buren, " and I was greatly crestfallen. The cross- 
examination of witnesses has never been a favorite prac- 
tice with me, since my experience has taught me that 
more cases are injured than benefited by it." 

Yan Buren's readiness and effectiveness on the stump 
is shown in the following story: 

He was making a speech in behalf of his father, Presi- 
dent Yan Buren, when an old Democrat rose and up- 
braided him as a bolter. Quick as a flash he replied to 
the charge. 

One day, he said, a man on horseback came up with a 
boy who was contending with an overturned load of hay. 



510 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Instead of tossing the hay back into the wagon, the boy 
was tossing it hither and thither, regardless of where it 
landed. The traveler halted and said: 

" My young friend, why do you work so furiously this 
hot weather ? Why don't you throw the hay back into 
the Avagon. and be more deliberate in your labors ? " 

The boy stopped, wiped his face with his shirt-sleeve, 
and pointing to the pile of hay on the roadside, said: 

"Stranger, dad's under there ! " 

Then he set about his work again, more furiously than 
ever. 

Vance, Zebulon B. — Senator Test was once describ- 
ing the limited means of the post-office in Kansas City : 

"Why, Mr. President, I have seen waiting at the de- 
livery windows a line of ladies half a mile long." 

Senator Yance said: 

" Mr. President, I wish to inquire if that is the usual 
length of women in Missouri ? " 

Verdict. — When a Welsh jury thought it right to ac- 
quit a prisoner, Baron Bramwell told them he hoped they 
had reconciled their consciences to their verdict, but by 
what process he was utterly unable to guess. It is only 
common charity to express a similar hope in every like 
case. One's faith in the "palladium of our liberties," 
however, often receives a rough shock by some more or 
less extraordinary verdict. Sir Francis Palgrave says 
that at the trial of a cause at Merioneth, the foreman of 
the jury said, " My lord, we do not know who is plaintiff 
or who is defendant, but we find for whoever is Mr. 
Flint's man." 

An Irish foreman of a jury trying a man for murder 
was told that he would be paid two hundred pounds if he 
persuaded the jury to return a verdict of manslaughter. 



BENCH AND BAR 511 

This verdict was returned and the friends of the pris- 
oner paid the money. 

" Did you have much trouble in getting that verdict ? " 
asked one. 

" Faith an' I had an awful struggle ; the rest of the 
jury wanted to acquit him, but, begorra, I wouldn't give 
way ! " 

Justice Maule indulged in a fine vein of irony because 
a counsel had put forward a plea so ridiculous that it 
could only have been used by a man who had no defence 
but was determined to say something. To his astonish- 
ment and disgust, however, the jury took him seriously, 
and gave a verdict in favor of the prisoner. 

An Irish verdict: "Guilty, with some little doubt 
whether he is the man." 

An illiterate jury having spent many hours in reach- 
ing a verdict, one of the jurymen was asked what the 
trouble was: 

" Waal," he said, " six on 'em wanted to give the plaint- 
iff $4,000, and six on 'em wanted to give him $3,000, so 
we split the difference and gave him $500." 

A story is told of a trial for burglary, in which one of 
the jurymen seemed so certain of the prisoner's innocence, 
and pleaded so eloquently and so convincingly, that the 
eleven others (who had no particular bias either way) 
allowed themselves to be argued into returning a verdict 
of " not guilty." A few days later fresh facts came to 
light, proving the accused man's innocence beyond a 
doubt. One of the eleven jurymen, happening to meet 
with the man who had so powerfully influenced them all, 
thanked him warmly for having saved them from the 
commission of a great injustice. " And yet," he added, 
" as you could not have known then anything about these 



512 WIT AND HUMOR. 

new facts, how could you be so sure that the man was 
innocent?" 

" Well, my chief reason for thinking that he did not 
commit the crime was, that 1 committed it myself" 

Judge Grier, of the United States Supreme Court, once 
tried an ejectment case in Pennsylvania. The blundering 
jury having returned an unjust verdict, the judge said to 
the clerk: 

" Mr. Clerk, that verdict is set aside by the court. It 
may as well be understood that in this state it takes thir- 
teen men to steal a man's farm." 

In the Southern States the color line is well drawn. This 
is amusingly shown by the reply of a colored juror at the 
Jones County Superior Court, in Xorth Carolina. A negro 
was on trial for burglary. The jury consisted of four 
negroes and eight white men. During the night they 
came to a verdict which was received by the judge with- 
out awaking the solicitor, as the prosecuting officer in 
that state is called. The next morning the solicitor, Swift 
Galloway, while washing his face on the hotel porch, was 
surprised to see one of the negro jurors walk by. 

"Hello, Jim," said he, "did the jury agree?" 

"Yes, sah." 

" How did the verdict go ? " 

"Democratic, sah." 

Judge : " Gentlemen of the jury, your verdict is not in 
accordance with the evidence." 

Foreman : " May it please the court, the evidence was 
not in accordance with the facts." 

Some good stories are related of the late Sir Matthew 
Begbie, chief justice of British Columbia. Here is one of 
them : 

In 1883 a man was charged in Yictoria with having 



BENCH AND BAR. 513 

killed another man with a sandbag, and in the face of 
the judge's summing up the jury brought in a verdict of 
not guilty. This annoyed the chief justice, who at once 
said: 

" Gentlemen of the jury, mark that is your verdict, not 
mine. On your conscience will rest the stigma of return- 
ing such a disgraceful verdict. Many repetitions of such 
conduct as yours will make trial by jury a horrible farce 
and the city of Yictoria a nest of immorality and crime. 
Go, I have nothing more to say to you." And then turn- 
ing to the prisoner, the chief justice added : " You are dis- 
charged. Go and sandbag some of those jurymen; they 
deserve it." 

Yerdicts of a Welsh jury — the foreman presenting 
them: "Not guilty — but we recommend him not to do 
it again; " and "My lord, we find the man who stole the 
mare not guilty." 

A Devonshire jury, having found a man guilty of steal- 
ing hay, added the following rider: 

" We don't think the prisoner done it, but there's been 
a lot taken hereabouts by some one." 

Long years ago Chief Justice Spencer, of New York, 
was holding court on Staten Island. The evidence against 
the prisoner charged with a high crime was clear, and the 
judge charged strongly against him. The jury brought 
in a verdict of not guilty. The commanding figure of 
the judge rose to its full height. " Prisoner," said he, in 
loud and severe tones, " you have had a most extraordi- 
nary escape from condign punishment, which you de- 
served ; and you may be assured the time will come when 
you will be tried vX an other h&Y, where it is some satisfac- 
tion, even now, to know that there will he no Staten Island 
jury to acquit you I " 

33 



514 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Verdict announced by the foreman of a Limerick jury : 
"Unanimous — nine to three." 

In a criminal trial in Illinois, the judge instructed the 
jury that it was "the judge of the law as well as the 
facts," but added that it was not to judge of the law un- 
less it was fully satisfied that it knew more law than the 
judge. An outrageous verdict having been rendered, the 
judge felt called upon to rebuke the jury. At last an old 
farmer on the jury said: 

" Jedge, weren't we to jedge the law as well as the 
facts?" 

"Certainly; but I told you not to judge the law unless 
you were clearly satisfied that you knew the law better 
than I did." 

"Well, jedge, we considered that pint." 

A prominent lawyer in the north of England was sur- 
prised occasionally by unexpected verdicts rendered by 
the juries. Meeting a juryman out of court, he ventured 
to inquire how he happened to arrive at a certain de- 
cision. 

" Well," replied the juryman, " I'm a plain man, and I 
like to be fair to every one. I don't go by what the wit- 
nesses say, and I don't go by what the lawyers say, and 
I don't go by what the judges say; but I looks at the 
man in the dock, and I says, he must have done some- 
thing or he wouldn't be there, so I brings 'em all in guilty." 

" Soap the judge and butter the jury " was the advice 
of a successful barrister to a young attorney. By thus 
lubricating his fellow Englishmen, it is said that Sergeant 
Bond used to get a verdict in the words, " We finds for 
Sergeant Bond, and costs." 

Judge: "Gentlemen of the jury, your verdict is de- 
cidedly mixed." 



BENCH AND BAR. 515 

Foreman: "Yes, your honor; it is in accordance with 
the evidence." 

Nearly two centuries ago Alexander Pope wrote : 

" The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, 
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine." 

Waite, M. R.— Chief Justice Waite, of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, had a distressing experience. 
Like many great men he was very absent-minded. Hav- 
ing an imperative engagement at Baltimore, he adjourned 
court, and leisurely proceeded to the railroad depot. On 
reaching it, he had but ten minutes to get a ticket and a 
seat on the train. To his surprise, he quickly discovered 
he had only a few pennies in his pocket. He had neg- 
lected to provide himself with cash for the journey. 
There was no one present whom he knew. His engage- 
ment was important. What was to be done ? He ad- 
vanced to the ticket window, smiled in his pleasantest 
manner, and asked the ticket agent if he knew him. 

" No, I don't," snarled the agent; " and, what is more, 
I don't want to. What do you want ? " 

" A ticket to Baltimore and return. I am the Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court, but have no money with 
me. It is purely accidental. I can give you my personal 
check." 

"Oh, I know you; I know all the bloods; but that 
dodge won't work at this office. I have just had two 
members of the Cabinet trying to 'bilk' me out of tickets, 
and no Chief Justice dodge gets me. Take your face 
from the window, and make way for people who have 
money." 

The Chief Justice glared. He could not fine the young 
man for contempt of court. The case was beyond his 
jurisdiction. But he felt meaner than if he had been a 
real fraud. He blushed and perspired so that the agent 



516 WIT AND HUMOR 

was confirmed in his opinion. The Chief Justice dashed 
out of the station to see if he could find some one to iden- 
tify him. He had only five minutes left. It was too short 
a time to reach the Capitol. He saw no familiar face. 
Across the street was a saloon and eating-house. He 
made a hasty rush across, but checked himself at the 
door. What if he should be seen going into a common 
rum-shop ? What if some one inside should know him ? 
But there was no time to spare. Spying a private en- 
trance, he dashed in and accosted the proprietor in a 
frantic haste, " Do you know me ? " 

" Bet yer head 1 do, yer honor," said the short-haired, 
freckle-faced man behind the bar. " Ye're the boss av 
the Shupreme Coort. I see ye every day goin' by here 
on the cars." 

" Will you cash my check ? I have no time to explain." 
Here the Chief Justice grabbed a piece of paper upon a 
desk near by and began to write hurriedly. 

" Shure an' I will, yer honor. I've seen ould byes on 
a tear before get out o' money. Trust me, sorr. Is it a 
twenty ye want ? Here it is. Will ye have a drop be- 
fore you run ? " 

But, before any further explanation could be made, the 
Chief Justice had grabbed the money and was running 
across the street. In some way the ticket agent had 
learned of his blunder during the judge's absence, and 
was all politeness when he saw the money. The judge 
barely made the train, but he had not had such a shock 
to his dignit} 7 during his whole term upon the bench of 
the Supreme Court. 

Walton, Charles W. — A Uase, conceited lawyer 
was telling Judge Walton, of the Maine Supreme Court, 
what it cost him to live: 

"My personal expenses are something tremendous, 



BENCH AND BAR, 517 

judge; now you just guess what it co^ts me to live a 
year." 

The judge guessed solemnly and judicially. 

"Oh! that is about half what I spend," replied the 
lawyer, with all the satisfaction of a man who has sur- 
prised another. His honor looked him over calmly and 
sympathetically and then said with deep concern : 

" It costs you that to live, does it ? Well, if I were 
you I would give up the struggle — it is not worth what 
you are paying." 

Walworth, R. H. — Chancellor Walworth, of New 
York, marvelously rapid in his mental processes, fre- 
quently caused the bar annoyance by interrupting coun- 
sel and anticipating the points of their arguments. He 
saw or thought he saw where the arrow would strike 
while counsel were bending the bow ; and he often grew 
weary listening for hours to the slow progress of prosy 
counselors, when he, himself, had long since reached his 
destination, and, as it were, put up for the night, and per- 
haps gone to sleep. Experience shows that it is shorter 
and better in the majority of cases to let counsel proceed 
without interruption. 

A plain old counselor, plodding prosily along with his 
argument, was interrupted by Walworth, who was al- 
ways anticipating counsel. The old counselor feelingly 
observed : 

" Now, your honor, I am aware that you know a great 
deal more law than I do, but allow me to say that I know 
a great deal more about this case than you do. Why, 
your honor, I have lived with this case for twenty years ; 
I have worked with it and slept with it ; I know all its 
ins and outs; for twenty years I have digged and worked 



518 WIT AND HUMOR. 

with it ; and I really wish your honor would let me go on 
in my own poor way." 

He was allowed to proceed. 

Walworth's discomfiture was only less signal than that 
of Curran's victim, whose habit of anticipation was so 
signally rebuked by the witty lawyer. The gentleman 
in question, a nobleman, had invited Curran, with others, 
to dinner, but Curran was late, and when he appeared was 
apparently in a state of great agitation. He attempted 
to excuse his tardiness by telling his host of a terrible 
tragedy of which he had just been an unwilling witness. 
As he was passing a market he observed a butcher about 
to kill a calf, when, just as the butcher had raised his 
knife, his little son, a beautiful child, ran between the 
knife and the calf, " and oh, my God ! " said Curran, " the 
wretched man killed — " " The child ! the child ! " shrieked 
his lordship. " No, my lord," answered Curran, " the calf. 
Your lordship's anticipation is as usual incorrect." 

Mr. Mulock, a witty Irish lawyer for whom Walworth 
did not entertain high respect, was asked by his honor: 

" Mr. Mulock, will you permit me to ask who prepared 
these pleadings ? " 

"Yes, your honor; I did." 

" Then I have only to say you should have consulted 
counsel." 

" May it please your honor, I have not known whom to 
consult since your honor left the bar." 

Members of the profession present were convulsed with 
laughter by this witty response. 

Walworth once in a while caught a tartar when he an- 
ticipated counsel. Marcus T. Reynolds, having suffered 
from his disagreeable habit, determined to punish him, 
and so set a trap for him. In commencing an argument 



BENCH AND BAR 519 

Eeynolds " supposed " a particular state of facts, and was 
slowly proceeding, when the chancellor broke in : 
" Ah, I see, Mr. Eeynolds, your point is so-and-so." 
" No," replied Eeynolds, gravely, " that isn't exactly it, 
your honor," and he then put forward a still more intri- 
cate hypothesis. The chancellor looked dubious for a 
moment, but shortly interrupted again: 

" Yes, yes, Mr. Eeynolds, I see, I see ; this is your idea." 
" No," said the imperturbable Reynolds again, " that 
isn't quite it, your honor; " and he put a third case. A 
third interruption and a third anticipation ensued, and 
then Eeynolds significantly paused, drew himself up, and 
slowly observed, " No, your honor, that isn't it, and what 
is more, your honor never can guess until I tell you." 

Ware, Eugene P. — Ware, of Fort Scott, Kansas, one 
of the bright literary members of the legal profession, is 
the author of humorous verse of a high order. His re- 
port of State v. Lewis, elsewhere in this volume, and 
A Kansas Zephyr are of lasting value. Of the latter, 
much admired by Hon. Thomas B. Eeed, a friend says: 

There is nothing conventional in Eeed. He likes what 
takes his fancy without regard to whether it may be ac- 
cording to accepted standards or not. Nothing ever 
pleased him more than the verses of Eugene F. Ware, 
which he happened on by chance when they were first 
published. He wrote an appreciative note to Ware, and 
one of the rhymes which he regards about the cleverest 
bit of versifying in American literature he loves to recite 
to sympathetic listeners, rendering the lines with rare 
unction and telling emphasis. They are so characteristic 
of Eeed in their discerning humor that here they are: 

A Kansas Zephyr. 
" Once a Kansas zephyr strayed 
Where a cross-eyed bull-pup played, 



520 WIT AND HUMOR. 

And that foolish canine bayed 
At that zephyr in a gay 
Semi-idiotic way. 
Then that zephyr in about 

Half a jiffy took that pup 

Tipped him over, wrong side up; 
Then it turned him wrong side out, 
And it calmly journeyed thence 
With a barn and string of fence. 

Moral: 

When communities turn loose 
Social forces that produce 

The disorders of a gale, 
Act upon a well-known law, 
Face the breeze, but close your jaw— 

It's a rule that will not fail. 
If you bay it in a gay, 
Self-sufficient sort of way 
It will land you, without doubt, 
Upside down and wrong side out." 

Warner, Charles Dudley Warner, one of Amer- 
ica's most popular essayists, studied law in the Univer- 
sity of Pennsylvania, whence he was graduated and ad- 
mitted to the bar in 1856. For four years he practiced 
law in Chicago. His delicate humor is reflected in the 
following from " My Summer in a Garden: " 

" Speaking of the philosophical temper, there is no class 
of men whose society ; s to be more desired for this qual- 
ity than that of plumbers. They are the most agreeable 
men I know ; and the boys in the business begin to be 
agreeable very early. I suspect the secret of it is that 
they are agreeable by the hour. In the driest days my 
fountain became disabled; the pipe was stopped up. A 
couple of plumbers, with the implements of their craft, 
came out to view the situation. There was a good deal 
of difference of opinion about where the stoppage was. 



BENCH AND BAR. 521 

I found the plumbers perfectly willing to sit down and 
talk about it — talk by the hour. Some of their guesses 
and remarks were exceedingly ingenious ; and their gen- 
eral observations on other subjects were excellent in their 
way, and could hardly have been better if they had been 
made by the job. The work dragged a little, as it is apt 
to do by the hour. The plumbers had occasion to make 
me several visits. Sometimes they would find upon ar- 
rival that they had forgotten some indispensable tool; 
and one would go back to the shop, a mile and a half, 
after it, and his comrade would wait his return with the 
most exemplary patience, and sit down and talk — always 
by the hour. I do not know but it is a habit to have 
something wanted at the shop. They seemed to be very 
good workmen, and always willing to stop and talk about 
the job, or anything else, when I went near them. Nor 
had they any of that impetuous hurry that is said to be 
the bane of our American civilization. To their credit 
be it said that I never observed anything of it in them. 
They can afford to wait. Two of them will sometimes 
wait nearly half a day while a comrade goes for a tool. 
They are patient and philosophical. It is a great pleas- 
ure to meet such men. One only wishes there was some 
work he could do for them by the hour. There ought to 
be reciprocity. I think they have very nearly solved the 
problem of life — it is to work for other people, never 
for yourself, and get your pay by the hour. You then 
have no anxiety and little work. If you do things by the 
job you are perpetually driven; the hours are scourges. 
If you work by the hour you generally sail on the stream 
of Time, which is always bearing you on to the haven of 
Pay, whether you make any effort or not. "Working by 
the hour tends to make one moral. A plumber working 
by the job, trying to unscrew a rusty, refractory nut in a 



522 WIT AND HUMOR. 

cramped position, where the tongs continually slipped off,, 
would swear; but I never heard one of them swear or 
exhibit the least impatience at such a vexation, working 
by the hour. Nothing can move a man who is paid by 
the hour. How sweet the flight of time seems to his 
calm mind ! " 

Webster, Daniel. — Webster was a lawyer and states- 
man of great eloquence and splendid courage. His domi- 
nant intellectual characteristic — gravity — was bright- 
ened as by gleams of gold with rare touches of wit and 
humor. 

In referring to Webster's success in many great cases, 
Mr. Hapgood, in his finely written biography, says: 

One of them should be mentioned for an anecdote con- 
nected with it which lights up the nature of Webster's 
legal thought. In what is known as the Khode Island 
case, a young attorney named Bosworth was sent to ex- 
plain the facts and the conclusions reached by the lawyers 
who had prepared the case. Webster listened to the ex- 
planation and felt that something was wanting. " Is that 
all?" he asked. The young attorney then modestly 
offered a theory of his own, which his superiors had re- 
jected. "Mr. Bosworth," exclaimed Webster, "by the 
blood of all the Bosworths who fell on Bosworth field, 
that is the point of the case." That, in the law as in 
politics, was the nature of his mind. With judgment and 
tact he listened to what others contributed and then he 
picked out the point and brought all his powers to bear 
on that. Hence the success of that fairness to opponents 
which made him state their arguments better than they 
had been able to formulate them for themselves. He 
could afford to give the opposition a powerful statement,. 



BENCH AND BAR. 525 

for he relied on no trick or subtlety, but on the clear pres- 
entation of deep-seated truths. 

He smote the rock of the national resources, and abun- 
dant streams of revenue gushed forth; he touched the 
dead corpse of Public Credit, and it sprang upon its feet. 
— Eulogy on Alexander Hamilton. 

His wonderful eloquence appears in the following pas- 
sage: 

" When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last 
time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on 
the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious 
Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on 
a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in 
fraternal blood. Let their last feeble and lingering glance 
rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now 
known and honored throughout the earth, still full high 
advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their orig- 
inal lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, or a single star 
obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable inter- 
rogatory as ' What is all this worth ? ' nor those other 
words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union 
afterwards;' but everywhere, spread all over in charac- 
ters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they 
float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind 
under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to 
every true American heart, ' Liberty and Union, now and 
forever, one and inseparable.' " 

"We wish that this column, rising towards heaven 
among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated 
to God, may contribute also to produce, in all minds, a 
pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, 
finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves 
his native shore, and the first to gladden his who revisits 



524 WIT AND HUMOR. 

it, may be something which shall remind him of the lib- 
erty and the glory of his country. Let it rise ! let it rise, 
till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of 
the morning gild it, and the parting day linger and play 
on its summit." — Address on laying the Corner-stone of 
the Bunker Hill Monument. 

A story told of his going to a country fair with his 
brother Ezekiel shows the characters of these brothers 
better than a chapter. Their father had given each of 
them a dollar to spend. When the boys got home Dan- 
iel was in gay spirits and Ezekiel was depressed. 

"Well, Dan," said his father, "did you spend your 
money ? " 

" Of course I did." 

" And Zeke, what did you do with your dollar ? " 

" Loaned it to Dan." 

In declining the clerkship of the court of Hillsborough 
county, New Hampshire, he said, " I mean to use my 
tongue in the courts, not my pen; to be an actor, not the 
register of other men's actions." 

The late St. George Tucker Campbell, of Philadelphia, 
a lawyer of great distinction, used to relate an anecdote 
illustrative of Webster's pre-eminent ability. Mr. Camp- 
bell said that having been retained in a somewhat famous 
case with Webster, who was detained by his senatorial 
duties at Washington, the conduct of the case through 
all the preliminaries devolved upon him, it being agreed 
that Mr. Webster should deliver the closing argument. 
" But," said Campbell, " day after day went by without 
bringing the great expounder, until the very last day be- 
fore that on which the closing argument was to be deliv- 
ered, and I was in despair. I was sitting in my room at 
the hotel, debating with myself what to do, when Web- 



BENCH AND BAR. 525 

ster was announced. After the little civilities had passed, 
he asked me to tell him about the case. 

"Why, Mr. Webster," said I, "is it possible you know 
nothing of the case ? " 

"Nothing whatever," said he, "tell me about it." 

"I was utterly dumfounded, and pointing to a pile of 
testimony a foot deep on the table, I said: 'How am 1 
to convey all that to you in the little time that is left 
us?'" 

" Never mind details. Give me the case generally and 
the salient points." 

" He sat down at the table opposite me, and I gave 
him a rapid synopsis of the case, which took two hours 
and more. One point I especially called to his atteution. 
The opposing counsel were bent on securing a continu- 
ance of the case, while our interests demanded an imme- 
diate decision. As a reason against granting the continu- 
ance, I cited the fact that the other side had protracted 
the cross-examination excessivety, occupying six days in 
the case of one witness. 

"Mr. Webster bade me good-night after I had concluded, 
and went to bed. T lie next morning he came into court 
as serene and majestic as Jove himself, while I was nerv- 
ous and apprehensive to the last degree. He began his 
address to the court with that slow, ponderous gravity 
so characteristic of him in the outset of his forensic ef- 
forts, then gradually warmed and quickened. I listened 
spellbound, for in essence it was nothing but what I had 
pumped into him in the two hours and a half talk of the 
day before. But how transmuted and transformed. To 
give you an idea of the transformation, I will take the 
point to which I h^ve alluded. He rendered it thus: 

" 4 They ask for a continuance ! Why, may it please 
the court, they have taken at this hearing as much time 



526 WIT AND HUMOR. 

in the cross-examination as it took the Almighty to cre- 
ate the universe ! ' 

" That represents the difference between his speech and 
my talk ; my simple six days grew to the colossal figure 
I have described under the magic touch of his genius, and 
this instance was characteristic of the whole." 

In a case he had tried and lost, one of the witnesses 
said to him : 

" Mr. Webster, if I had thought we should have lost 
the case, I might have testified a great deal more than I 
did." 

" It is of no consequence," said Webster, " the jury did 
not believe a word you said." 

Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine 
in trousers. — Sydney Smith. 

Webster, on his way to Washington, was once com- 
pelled to proceed at night by stage from Baltimore. He 
had no traveling companions, and the driver had a sort 
of felon look, which produced no inconsiderable alarm 
with the Senator. " I endeavored to tranquilize myself," 
said Webster, "and had partially succeeded, when we 
reached the woods between Bladensburg and Washington 
(a proper scene for murder or outrage), and here, I con- 
fess, my courage again deserted me. Just then the driver, 
turning to me, with a gruff voice asked my name. I 
gave it to him. 

" ' Where are you going.' 

« i To Washington. I am a Senator.' 

" Upon this the driver seized me fervently by the hand, 
and exclaimed: 

" ' How glad I am ; I have been trembling in my seat for 
the last hour, for when I looked at you I took you for a 
highwayman.' " 



BENCH AND BAR. 527 

Webster wrote to the editor of a newspaper which re- 
ferred to his private affairs, and especially to his not pay- 
ing his debts: 

" It is true that I have not always paid my debts punct- 
ually, and that I owe money. One cause of this is that 
I have not pressed those who owe me for pay. As an 
instance of this I enclose your father's note, made to me 
thirty years ago, for money lent him to educate his boys." 

"When I was a student in Webster's office," says 
Judge Burbank, " he kept an office boy and made a prac- 
tice of giving him all the coppers passed to him for 
change when doing his errands. One day Webster came 
to the room where I was sitting, his face all aglow with 
one of his benignant smiles, and said: 

" ' Mr. Burbank, that boy of ours will either make a 
smart man or become a great rascal. I gave him a quar- 
ter to buy a paper this morning, and he has brought me 
back nineteen pennies.' And the great man, laughing 
and enjoying the joke, swept the pennies with his hand 
from the table to the floor, allowing the boy to carry 
them off for his smartness." 

Once while he was addressing the Senate, the Senate 
clock commenced striking, but instead of striking twice 
at two P. M. continued to strike without cessation more 
than forty times. All eyes were turned to the clock, 
and Webster remained silent until the clock had struck 
about twenty, when he thus appealed to the chair: 

" Mr. President, the clock is out of order ! I have the 
floor ! " 

Webster told the following anecdote, illustrative of the 
fine distinctions on which we build our judgments: 

A tailor being examined in a capital case in which 
Webster was engaged was called to prove that he made 



528 WIT AND HUMOR. 

a certain coat for the criminal. On cross-examination he 
was asked how he knew the coat was his work. 

"Why, I know it by my stitches, of course." 

" Are your stitches longer than those of other tailors ? " 

"Oh, no!" 

"Well, then, are they shorter?" 

"No, they are not shorter." 

" Is there anything peculiar ab^ut them ? " 

" No, I do not think there is." 

" Then how do you dare to come here and swear that 
they are yours ? " 

This seemed a poser, but the witness was equal to it. 
Casting a look of contempt upon the examining lawyer, 
the tailor threw up his hands, and exclaimed, " Mercy on 
us ! As if I didn't know my own stitches ! " 

The jury believed him and Webster said they were 
right. 

A sharp man, having a small case to be tried at Nan- 
tucket, posted to Webster's office in great haste. It was 
a contest with a neighbor over a matter of considerable 
local interest, and his pride as a litigant was at stake. He 
told Webster the particulars and asked what he would 
charge to conduct the case. 

" You can't afford to employ me ; I should have to stay 
down there the whole week, and my fees would be worth 
more than the whole case is worth. I couldn't go down 
there for less than $1,000. I could try every case on the 
docket as well as one, and it wouldn't cost any more, and 
one case would take my time for the entire week, any- 
way." 

" All right, Mr. Webster," quickly responded the Nan- 
tucketer. "Here's your $1,000. You come down and 
I'll fix it so you can try every case." 

Webster was so amused over this proposition that he 



BENCH AND BAR. 529 

kept his word. He spent the entire week in Nantucket, 
and appeared on one side or the other in every case that 
came up for hearing. The shrewd Nantucketer hired 
Daniel out to all his friends who were in litigation, and 
received in return about $1,500. 

He had been shooting in the marshes at Marshfield, 
and employed a man to ferry him across a river. The 
ferryman declined payment, but remarked: 

" This is Daniel Webster, I believe." 

" That is my name." 

"Well, now," said the ferryman, "I am told that you 
can make from three to four dollars a day, pleadin' cases 
up in Boston." 

Webster replied that he was sometimes so fortunate as 
to receive that amount for his services. 

" Well, now," returned the rustic, " it seems to me if 
I could get as much in the city, pleadin' law cases, I 
wouldn't be a-wadin' over these marshes in this hot 
weather, shootin' birds." 

When Webster and his brother Ezekiel were together 
they had frequent literary disputes. On one occasion, 
after retiring to bed, they squabbled over a passage in one 
of their school books, and rising to examine some author- 
ities accidentally set fire to their bed-clothes and nearly 
burned their father's dwelling. On being questioned the 
next morning in regard to the accident, Daniel remarked 
u that they were in pursuit of light, but got more than 
they wanted." 

In a speech in Faneuil Hall, Webster was arguing in 
favor of the Maysville road bill. Mr. Otis sat near him 
on the platform. Webster proceeded as follows: 

" I am in favor, Mr. Chairman, of all roads except — 
except." Here he stuck, and could not think of any ex- 
34 ' 



530 WIT AND HUMOR 

ception. Otis saw his difficulty, and said to him in a low 
voice : 

" Say ' except the road to ruin.' " 

Webster heard it, and as if he had merely stopped for 
the purpose of making his remark more effective, re- 
peated the whole as follows: 

" I repeat it, Mr. Chairman, I am in favor of all roads 
except the road to rum." 

The wit in Otis in this instance was well met by the 
presence of mind in Webster. 

During Webster's residence in Portsmouth, in his 
younger days, Judkins, a furniture dealer well informed 
and ambitious, was in business there. He was patronized 
by Webster, who often dropped into the shop to order or 
superintend the making of some piece of furniture. These 
opportunities of conversing with a man so learned as 
Webster were the delight of Judkins' life; and on the 
removal of the former to Boston, the payment of a con- 
siderable debt due Judkins was willingly left for future 
settlement. Attempts were made at various times to col- 
lect the debt — always in vain. Finally Judkins deter- 
mined to go to Boston and see Webster himself. He 
reached the city after a long and fatiguing stage ride, 
and, making a Sunday toilet, proceeded to the large house 
on the corner of High and Summer streets. 

" Is Mr. Webster in ? " 

"Yes," said the servant who answered the bell, "but 
he cannot possibly be seen; he is entertaining some Wash- 
ington gentlemen — they are dining." 

"Well, I'll come in and wait till dinner is over." 

The puzzled servant decided to take the importunate 
stranger's name to his master. Fancy the surprise of 
Judkins at seeing Webster rushing upstairs and insisting 
upon the poor man's joining at the dinner table. He 



BENCH AND BAR 53 1 

would take no denial, and carried him forcibly, almost, 
introducing him as " My old and dear friend, Mr. Jud- 
kins, of Portsmouth," and seating him between a distin- 
guished Bostonian and the Secretary of the Navy. 

" I was for four mortal hours just as good as anybody," 
relates the worthy cabinet-maker; " my opinion was asked 
on a good many subjects, and they all seemed to think I 
knew a good deal. I was invited to visit them, and to go 
to Washington, and everybody asked me to drink wine 
with them ; and 1 made up my mind never to ask for my 
bill again. I was a poor man, and needed money, but I 
had been treated as I never expected to be treated in this 
world, and I was willing to pay for it." 

He was once engaged in a case in one of the Virginia 
courts. The opposing counsel was William Wirt, author 
of the "Life of Patrick Henry." In the progress of the 
trial Webster produced a highly respectable witness, 
whose testimony (unless disproved or impeached) settled 
the case, and annihilated Wirt's client. Wirt rose to 
commence the cross-examination, but seemed for a mo- 
ment quite perplexed how to proceed. Quickly assum- 
ing a manner expressive of his incredulity as to the facts 
elicited, and coolly eyeing the witness a moment, he said: 
" Mr. K., allow me to ask you whether you have ever 
read a work called 'Baron Munchausen?' " 'Before the 
witness had time to reply, Webster quickly said, " I beg 
your pardon, Mr. Wirt, for the interruption; but there is 
one question I forgot to ask the witness, and if you will 
allow me the favor, I promise not to interrupt you again." 
Wirt, replying in the blandest manner, "Yes, most cer- 
tainly," Webster deliberately and solemnly said to the 
witness : " Have you ever read Wirt's ' Patrick Henry? ' ' 
The effect was so irresistible that even the judge could 
not control his rigid features. Wirt himself joined in 



532 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the momentary laugh, and, turning to Webster, said. 
" Suppose we submit this case to the jury without sum- 
ming up? " which was assented to, and Webster's client 
won the case. 

Webster was invited to dinner with another equally 
famous by a gentleman of wealth, whose personal vanity 
was much more flattered by the entertainment of such 
guests than his mind could possibly be improved by them. 
The dinner was excellent. 

" This, gentlemen," he remarked, in the manner of a 
lecturer, as the servant removed the cobwebs from a bot- 
tle and placed it upon the table, " this wine has been in 
my cellar for forty years. I bought it when I was a 
young man, and the interest, gentlemen, the interest upon 
what I paid for it would have amounted to — ." 

The statesman was beginning to tire of this dissertation 
and winked pleasantly at his confrere : 

" Indeed," said he, reaching across the table and ap- 
propriating the bottle, " then suppose we stop the inter- 
est." 

Webster was apt to over indulge himself at public din- 
ners, but managed, when called upon, to make a speech — 
if a brief one. At Rochester, New York, he once de- 
lighted the company with the following: 

"Men of Rochester ! I am glad to see you; and I am 
glad to see your noble city. Gentlemen, I saw your falls, 
which, I am told, are one hundred and fifty feet high; 
that is a very interesting fact. Gentlemen, Rome had 
her Caesar, her Scipio, her Brutus; but Rome in her 
proudest days had never a waterfall a hundred and fifty 
feet high ! Gentlemen, Greece had her Pericles, her De- 
mosthenes, and her Socrates ; but Greece, in her palmiest 
days, never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high. 



BENCH AND BAR 533 

Men of Eochester, go on ! No people ever lost their lib- 
erty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high ! " 

On another occasion he said : 

"Gentlemen, there's the national debt — it should be 
paid ; yes, gentlemen, it should be paid. I'll pay it my- 
self. How much is it ? " 

Webster's last days were given up to a fight of his 
powerful constitution against the inevitable, says Kev. Dr. 
Cuyler. The last time he walked from his bed to his 
window he called out to his servant, " I want you to moor 
my little yacht down there where I can see it from my 
window." " Yes, sir." " Then I want you to hoist the 
flag at the masthead, and every night I want you to hang 
the old lamp up in the rigging. When I go down I want 
to go down with my colors flying and my lamp burning." 

Westbury, Richard B. — In his later life, Chancellor 
Westbury, when sitting regularly on the judicial commit- 
tee of the Privy Council, met ex-Chief Justice Erie and 
asked him why he did not attend. 

" For three very good reasons," said Erie ; " because I 
am old, because I am deaf, and because I am stupid." 

" These are no impediments," said Westbury; " is 

very old, is very deaf, and is very stupid, and 

yet we four make an excellent court." 

Sir Charles Russell, referring to his method of profes- 
sional work, says : u My rule is never to trouble about the 
authorities or case-law supposed to bear on a particular 
question until I have accurately and definitely ascer- 
tained the precise facts. This rule I got from Lord West- 
bury. When young at the bar, and pleading before him, 
I was plunging into citation of cases, when he very good- 
naturedly pulled me up, and said: 
- " Mr. Russell, don't trouble yourself with authorities 



534 WIT AND HUMOR. 

until we have ascertained with precision the facts; and 
then we shall probably find that a number of authorities 
which seem to bear some relation to the question have 
really nothing important to do with it." 

No one could say a sharp or bitter thing with more 
complete coolness than Westbury. He remarked, with 
his misleading gentleness, when some one spoke of the 
Chief Justice cf the Common Pleas, " I think that, with a 
little more experience, Bovill will probably make the 
worst judge in England." 

Wether ell, Sir Charles. — When Campbell's pro- 
posed " Lives of the Lord Chancellors " was referred to 
at a dinner in Lincoln's Inn Hall, Wetherell remarked : 
" He has added a new pang to death." 

Whiton, Edward V.— Of the anecdotes of Chief 
Justice Whiton, of the Supreme Court in the early days 
of Wisconsin, a few survive. His feet were remarkable 
for their symmetry and smallness. The expression of 
his face was sad, adding much to the plainness of his 
features. Isaac Woodle, a wit of the bar, said : 

" If I could have Whiton's feet I would almost be will- 
ing to have his head." 

Whiton in society was reticent, apparently absorbed 
in his own reflections. While dining in a hotel, those 
near him began discussing peat, large deposits of which 
lie in the Four Lake country. One of them said : 

" Judge, what do you think of peat ? " 

" Pete ! Pete ! " replied the judge, as if startled from a 
reverie, "really I don't know him." 

While at the bar, practicing over a large circuit — 
having retired for the night at a country tavern — a man 
came to his room desirous of having him take a case. 



BENCH AND BAR 535 

His grievance was that he had put his horse to pasture 
in the field of a neighbor, at an agreed price, and that a 
rattlesnake had bitten the horse, so that he died. He in- 
sisted that the owner of the field was liable for the value 
of the horse. Wishing to be rid of the fellow, Whiton 
said: 

" Can't take your case. I am retained for the snake." 

Wilkins, Charles.— Sergeant Wilkins was a great 
orator, and notably successful in jury trials. His sharp 
legal fencing with Baron Piatt in the trial of Armistead 
v. Wilde is interesting. During the trial Wilkins put a 
question rather sharply to a witness called by him on be- 
half of the plaintiff. Piatt reminded the learned Sergeant 
that he was examining his own witness. 

" I admit, my lord, that it is my own witness, but we 
all well know that very frequently our own witnesses are 
not favorable witnesses." 

" That is not the mode in which witnesses ought to be 
treated, because they are to be protected as well as your- 
selves." 

" What have I done to call for protection ? " 

" The manner of addressing the witness is not such a 
manner as the witness ought to be addressed in." 

" I am sure the witness himself did not so feel it. I 
have been spoken to by others above me with ten times 
more courtesy than that displayed by your lordship. I 
am not to be schooled and rated." 

" You are not to be schooled or rated ; but when you 
are irregular in your manner or conduct, I shall inter- 
fere." 

" I submit to your lordship that I have not been irreg- 
ular, either in manner or conduct." 

" Of that I am the best judge." 

" You are a judge." 



536 WIT AND HUMOR 

" And I shall not forget to act as a judge." 
" And I shall not forget that I am a barrister and a 
man." 

In a case in which the plaintiff was a Jew, it is related 
that whilst Wilkins was cross-examining one of the plaint- 
iff's witnesses, a stranger tapped him on the shoulder, and, 
whispering in his ear, said: 

" Ask the witness whether he is not a Jew ? " 

"Why, you scoundrel," said Wilkins, "you are one." 

"But it will prejudice the jury, sir." 

Will. — Lord leaves, one of the brightest Scotchmen 
of his time, will long be remembered as the author of 
" The Jolly Testator Who Makes His Own Will: " 

Ye lawyers who live upon litigants' fees, 

And who need a good many to live at your ease, 

Grave or gay, win or witty, whate'er your degree, 

Plain stuff or Queen's Counsel, take counsel of me. 

When a festive occasion your spirit unbends, 

You should never forget the profession's best friends; 

So we'll send round the wine and a light bumper fill 

To the jolly testator who makes his own will. 

He premises his wish and his purpose to save 
All disputes among friends when he's laid in his grave; 
Then he straightway proceeds more disputes to create 
Than a long summer's day would give time to relate. 
He writes and erases, he blunders and blots, 
He produces such puzzles and Gordian knots, 
That a lawyer, intending to frame the deed ill, 
Couldn't match the testator who makes his own will. 

Testators are good; but a feeling more tender 
Springs up when I think of the feminine gender. 
The testatrix for me, who, like Telemaque's mother, 
Unweaves at one time what she wove at another; 
She bequeaths, she repeats, she recalls a donation, 
And she ends by revoking her own revocation; 
Still scribbling or scratching some new codicil ; 
O, success to the woman who makes her own will ! 



BENCH AND BAR. 537 

'Tisn't easy to say, 'mid her varying vapors, 

That scraps should be deemed "testamentary papers;" 

'Tisn't easy from these her intention to find, 

When, perhaps, she herself never knew her own mind. 

Every step that we take, there arises fresh trouble. 

Is the legacy lapsed ? is it single or double ? 

No customer brings so much grist to the mill 

As the wealthy old woman who makes her own will. 

The law decides questions of meum and tuum, 

By kindly consenting to make the thing suum. 

The iEsopian fable instructively tells 

What becomes of the oysters, and who gets the shells. 

The legatees starve, but the lawyers are fed; 

The seniors have riches, the juniors have bread; 

The available surplus, of course, will be nil 

From the worthy testators who make their own wilL 

You had better pay toll when you take to the road 

Than attempt by a by-way to reach your abode; 

You had better employ a conveyancer's hand 

Than encounter the risk that your will shouldn't stand. 

From the broad, beaten track when the traveler strays, 

He may land in a bog or be lost in a maze; 

And the law. when defied, will avenge itself still 

On the man and the woman who make their own will. 

Counsel (in a will contest) : " Did you see Mr. Timson, 
the testator, a short time before his death ? " 

Witness: "Every day for a week before he died." 

" What was his mental condition ? " 

" Yery much unbalanced. He had a singular delusion 
which nothing could remove." 

" What was the nature of the delusion ? " 

"Mr. Timson imagined he had made a will that could 
not be broken; he repeatedly said so. And he held to 
this delusion to the end." 

A wealthy Irishman over seventy, about to die, called 
in a lawyer to make his will. His wife, grasping and 
covetous, was present. The preliminaries of the will 



538 WIT AND HUMOR. 

having been concluded, it became necessary to inquire 
about the debts due the estate. Among these were sev- 
eral of importance of which the old lady had been in ig- 
norance. She was pleased to learn of these and that so 
much money would be forthcoming after the funeral. 

" Now, then," said the lawyer, " state explicitly the 
amount owed you by your friends." 

" Timothy Brown owes me fifty pounds; John Casey 
owes me thirty-seven pounds; and — " 

"Good! good!" ejaculated the prospective widow; 
" rational to the last ! " 

" Luke Bowen owes me forty pounds." 

" Rational to the last ! " put in the eager old lady again. 

"To Michael Liffey I owe two hundred pounds." 

" Ah ! " exclaimed the old woman, " hear him rave ! " 

To dispose of one's estate in poetry is as incongruous 
as digging with a jeweled spade. Still, several examples 
of rhymed wills exist. A solicitor wrote: 

" As to all my worldly goods, now or to be in store, 
I give them to my beloved wife, and hers for evermore. 
I give all freely; I no limit fix; 
This is my will, and she's executrix.' 

Maloney, a well-to-do Irishman, finding himself about to 
pass away, sent for his old attorney and friend O'Conor 
to come and make his will. Everything was in readiness, 
and the dying man said: 

" Put down fifty pounds for masses up at the church 
for the repose of my soul." 

The man scratched away, and then O'Conor said: 

« What next, Mr. Maloney ? " 

" Put down two hundred pounds for the Little Sisters 
of the Poor. Have we that down, Mr. O'Conor?" 

" I have, Mr. Maloney. What next ? " 



BENCH AND EAR. 539 

" Put down two hundred and fifty pounds for the Cork 
Orphan Asylum." 

" What next, Mr. Maloney ? " 

" Put down one thousand pounds for me brother Pat. 
He don't nade it, but it's all the same. I can't carry it 
with me." 

"What next, Mr. Maloney?" 

So the work went on slowly, the dying man bringing 
himself up with an effort to the task, and O 'Co nor stop- 
ping now and then to draw his finger across his nose 
and sniff sympathetically. Finally the dying man said 
faintly : 

" I think that is all I have to will." 

O'Conor footed up the items, looked at the balance in 
the little old bank book, and said: 

" No, Mr. Maloney, there's tin pounds jit. 93 

The dying man lay absorbed in thought for a few min- 
utes, and then said : 

" O'Conor, put down that tin pounds to spind with the 
bhoys at me funeral." 

O'Conor began to write; then he stopped, looked to- 
ward the bed with a puzzled expression, and asked softly: 

" Mr. Maloney, shall I put it down to spend going to 
the funeral or coming back ? " 

The dying man lay very quiet for a few moments, as 
he studied the problem, and then with an effort replied : 

" O'Conor, put down tin pounds to spind goin' to the 
funeral, for thin I'll be wid ye." 

" I, Timothy Delona, of Barrydownderry, in the county 
of Clare, farmer; being sick and wake in my legs, but of 
sound head and warm heart : Glory be to God ! — do 
make the first and last will the ould and new testament, 
first I give my soul to God, when it pleases Him to take 
it, sure no thanks to me, for I can't help it then, and 



540 WIT AND HUMOR. 

my body to be buried in the ground at Barry do wnderry 
Chapel, where all my kith an' kin that have gone before 
me, an' those that live after, belonging to me, are buried, 
pace to their ashes, and may the sod rest lightly over their 
bones. Bury me near my godfather, Felix O 'Flaherty, 
betwixt and between him and my father and mother, who 
lie separate altogether, at the other side of the chapel 
yard. I lave the bit of ground containing ten acres — 
rale old Irish acres — to me eldest son Tim, after the death 
of his mother, if she survives him. Teddy, my second 
boy, that was killed in the war of Amerikay, might have 
got the pick of the poultry, but as he is gone, I'll lave 
them to his wife, who died a wake before him. I lave to 
Peter Rafferty a pint of f ulpoteen I can't finish." 

A testator left all his estate to a monastery on condi- 
tion that on the return of his only son, then abroad, the 
worthy fathers should give him " whatever they should 
choose." When the son returned home he went to the 
monastery, and received but a small share, the monks 
choosing to keep the greater part for themselves. A bar- 
rister, on mention of the case, advised him to sue the mon- 
astery, and promised to gain his cause. The suit was 
brought, and the ingenious barrister, in his argument to 
the court, said: 

" The testator has left his son that share of the estate 
which the monks should choose; these are the express 
words of his will. Now it is plain what part they have 
chosen by what they keep for themselves. My client, 
then, stands upon the words of the will. ' Let me have,' 
says he, ' that part they have chosen, and I am satisfied.' " 

Wirt, William. — Wirt, the distinguished advocate 
of Yirginia, was Attorney-General of the United States for 
three full terms during the administrations of Monroe 



BENCH AND BAR. 541 

and John Quincy Adams. His letter to his young friend, 
Francis W. Gilmer, is a golden treasury of wit and wisdom : 

" Richmond, August 29, 1815. 
" My Dear Francis: I received last night your letter 
of the 15th instant, announcing your arrival at Winches- 
ter, and thank you for this early attention to my anxiety 
for your welfare. We have you at last fairly pitted on 
the arena — stripped, oiled, your joints all lubricated, 
your muscles braced, your nerves strung, and I hope that 
ere long we shall hear that you have taken the victim 
bull by the horn, with your left hand, 



durosque reducta 



Libravit dextra media inter cornua caestus 
Arduus, effractoque illisit in ossa cerebro, 
Sternitur exanimisque tremens procumbit humi bos. 

" I perceive that you are going to work pell-mell, nee 
mora, nee requies; that's your sort; give it to them thicker 
and faster ! 

Nunc dextra ingeminus ictus nunc ille sinistra. 

" It is this glow and enthusiasm of enterprise that is to 
carry you to the stars. But then bear in mind that it is 
a long journey to the stars, and that they are not be 
reached per salUim. ' Perseverando Vinces ' ought to be 
your motto, and you should write it in the first page 
of every book in your library. Ours is not a profession 
in which a man gets along by a hop, step and jump. It is 
the steady march of a heavy-armed legionary soldier. 
This armor you have yet, in a great measure, to gain; 
to learn how to put it on; to wear it without fatigue; to 
fight in it with ease, and use every piece of it to the best 
advantage. I am against your extending your practice, 
therefore, to too many courts in the beginning. I would 
not wish you to plunge into an extensive practice at once. 
It will break up your reading, and prevent you from pre- 



542 WIT AND HUMOR. 

paring properly for that higher theatre which you ought 
always to keep intently in your mind's eye. For two or 
three years you must read, sir — read — read — delve — 
meditate — study — and make the whole mine of the law 
your own. For two or three years, I had much rather 
that your appearances should be rare and splendid, than 
frequently light and vapid, like those of the young country 
practitioners about you. 

" Let me use the privilege of my age and experience to 
give you a few hints, which, now that you are beginning 
the practice, you may not find useless: 

" 1. Adopt a system of life as to business and exercise, 
and never deviate from it, except so far as you may be 
occasionally forced by imperious and uncontrollable cir- 
cumstances. 

" 2. Live in your office — i. e., be always seen in it, ex- 
cept at the hours of eating or exercise. 

u 3. Answer all letters as soon as they are received; 
you know not how many heartaches it may save you. 
Then fold neatly, indorse neatly, and file away neatly, 
alphabetically, and by the year, all the letters so received. 
Let your letters on business be short, and keep copies of 
them. 

" 4. Put every law paper in its place as socn as received, 
and let no scrap of paper be seen lying, for a moment, on 
your writing chair or tables. This will strike the eye of 
every man of business who enters. 

" 5. Keep regular accounts of every cent of income and 
expenditure, and file your receipts neatly, alphabetically, 
and by the month, or at least by the year. 

" 6. Be patient with your foolish clients, and hear all 
their tedious circumlocution and repetitions with calm 
and kind attention ; cross-examine and sift them, till you 
know all the strength and weakness of their cause, and 
take notes of it at once whenever you can do so. 



BENCH AND BAR 543 

" 7. File your bills in chancery at the moment of order- 
ing the suit, and while your client is yet with you to 
correct your statement of the case ; also prepare every 
declaration the moment the suit is ordered, and have it 
ready to file. 

" 8. Cultivate a simple style of speaking, so as to be 
able to inject the strongest thought into the weakest ca- 
pacity. You will never be a good jury lawyer without 
this faculty. 

" 9. Never attempt to be grand and magnificent before 
common tribunals — and the most you will address are 
common. The neglect of this principle of common sense 
has ruined with all men of sense. 

" 10. Keep your Latin and Greek and science to your- 
self and to that very small circle which they may suit. 
The mean and envious world will never forgive you your 
knowledge if you make it too public. It will require the 
most unceasing urbanity and habitual gentleness of man- 
ners, almost to humility, to make your superior attain- 
ments tolerable to your associates. 

"11. Enter with warmth and kindness into the inter- 
esting concerns of others, whether you care much for them 
or not, not with the condescension of a superior, but with 
the tenderness and simplicity of an equal. It is this 

benevolent trait which makes and such universal 

favorites, and, more than anything else, has smoothed my 
own path of life and strewed it with flowers. 

" 12. Be never flurried in speaking, but learn to assume 
the exterior of composure and self-collecteclness, whatever 
riot and confusion may be within; speak slow, firmly, 
distinctly, and mark your periods by proper pauses and 
a steady, significant look. ' Trick ! ' True ; but a good 
trick and a sensible trick. 

" You talk of complimenting your adversaries. Take 



544 WIT AND HUMOR. 

care of your manner of doing this. Let it be humble 
and sincere, and not as if you thought it was in your 
power to give them importance by you? fiat. You see 
how more natural it is for old men to preach than to 
practice ; yet you must not slight my sermons, for I wish 
you to be much greater than I ever was or can hope to 
be. Our friend Carr will tell you that my maxims are 
all sound. Practice them, and I will warrant your suc- 
cess. You have more science and literature than I, but 
I know a great deal more of the world and of life, and it 
will be much cheaper for you to profit by my experience 
and miscarriage than your own. Nothing is so apt to 
tincture the manners of a young man with hauteur, and 
with a cold and disdainful indifference toward others, as 
conscious superiority; and nothing is so fatal to his prog- 
ress through life as such a tincture; witness . My 

friend himself is not without some ill effect from it ; 

and, since you must feel this superiority, I cannot be 
without fear of its usual effects. 

" You must not suppose, because I give you precepts 
on particular subjects, that I have observed you deficient 
in these respects. On the contrary, it is only by way of 
prevention ; and, whether my precepts are necessary to 
you or not, you are too well assured of my affection to 
take them otherwise than in good part. Farewell. My 
letters shall not be lectures. 

" Yours affectionately, ¥m. Wirt." 



INDEX. 



Abaft the binnacle, 311. 
Abandoned habits, 194 
Abatement, plea in, 207. 
Abel, Cain and, 9. 
Abernethy, Lord, 153. 
Ability, acme of judicial, 218. 
Abinger, Lord, 132. 
Above one story, never, 476. 
Abroad, schoolmaster, 59. 
Absent-mindedness, 268, 479. 
Absorption, drunk from, 418. 
Absurd thing, when about to do 

an, 411. 
Absurdities, heightening all the, 

404. 
Accent, catching the, 152. 

frightful, 352. 

musical, 141. 
Accepting bail, 154. 
Accident of an accident, 501. 
According to the conscience, 459. 
Acme of judicial ability, 218. 
Acquittals, several, 465. 
Across the Potomac, 453. 
Act, as a judge, 536. 

legal tender, 205. 

of parliament, 372. 

repealed, 223. 

to amend an act, 292. 
Action, a personal, 329. 

on a bill of exchange, 76. 
Actor sequitur, 338. 
Adage affirmed, French, 329. 
35 



Ad captandum populum, 251. 

Added a new pang to death, 534. 

Addressing a gentleman, 144. 

Administration of justice, 356. 

Admiralty, 1. 

Admission to the bar, examina- 
tion for, 200. 

Admit it, I, 348. 

Admitting yourself out of court,. 
327. 

Advocate, a prosy, 442. 

Affidavit, oratory of, 4. 

Affirmed, French adage, 329. 

Afraid of any court, not, 322. 

Age of brass, succeeds the, 184.. 

Agree for the reasons, I, 411. 

Agreement, a verbal, 181. 

Agrees, still, 411. 

Ahead, fifteen words, 474. 

Air, walking in the, 312. 

Airing his vocabulary, 150. 

Alderson, Baron, 210, 332. 

Alibi, 7. 

All cry, little wool, 143. 
men are fools, 438. 

Allen, John, 11. 

Almanac, 93. 

Almighty strike me, may the, 229. 

Alone, riding, 361. 

Aloud, thinking, 387. 

Alps, like scaling the, 46. 

Altering the mark, 292. 

Althorp, Lord, 14. 



546 



INDEX. 



Always on right side, 490. 
Amber, in liquid, 430. 
American, I am an, 235. 
Ambiguity, old, 105. 
Amend, act to amend an act, 292. 
A mensa et thoro, 338. 
Anatomy, 212. 
Ancestors, 82. 
Andrews, Charles B., 394. 
And still they gazed, 81. 
Angler of the first water, 453. 
Anomalies, 14. 
Answer, a rude, 442, 501. 

a stupid, 179. 
Anti-climax, 100. 
Anticipating the argument, 519. 
An apathy to music, 364. 
Antiquity, ruins of, 411. 
Apologies, profuse, 114, 453. 
Appeals, eloquent, 17, 422. 

misdirected, 48. 
Appear, for whom do you, 211. 
Appearance, bond for his, 44 

presenting a sorry, 200. 
Application, a novel, 326. 
Apprehended, easily, 363. 
Aptness of quotation, 423. 
Arabin, Sergeant, 460. 
Archdeacon, definition of, 14 
Architect, political, 151. 
Argue it, wanting to, 433, 442. 
Arguing both sides, 489. 
Argument, anticipating the, 519. 

fits, a case that the, 389. 

long, 60, 168, 185. 

of counsel, 293. 

wrong, 41. 
Arguments, interminable, 60. 

making both, 489. 
Aristotle's rhetoric, 490. 
Armed at all points, 411. 
Armstrong, Sergeant, 211. 



Army at his heels, 459. 
Arrest and stop, 386. 
Art of knowing how, 291. 

the basis, 290. 
Ashman, William N., 28. 
Ask my patients, 475. 
Asking foolish questions, 494. 

for a continuance, 525. 

himself a question, 179. 
Ass, emperor an, 440. 

I'm an, 147. 

in judicial robes, 435. 

missing, the, 445. 

solemn as an, 119. 
Assailed, wherever it is, 346. 
Assault demesne, son, 302, 407. 
Assertion, reckless, 298. 
Assignments of error, 32. 
Atlantic, casting sovereign over 

453. 
Atom of humanity, miserable, 482. 
Attention of the court, demand- 
ing, 74, 83, 286. 
Attorney, an idle, 290. 

-general of crime, 394. 
Attorneys, repartee, 432. 

retort, 432. 
Attributable to his pen, 200. 
Audience, 378. 
Authorities, eminent, 284 
Autograph, 371. 
Avery, Waitstill, 244 
A vinculo matrimonii, 338. 

Babel, tower of, 133. 
Bacon, Lord, 35, 245. 
Bags, a question of, 442. 
Bail, accepting, 154 
Bailey, the Old, 137, 377, 470. 
Baldwin, Joseph G., 381, 415, 422. 
Ball, Justice, 107, 405. 
Balloon, like a, 412. 



INDEX. 



547 



Bangs, John Kendrick, 161. 
Bannatyne, Lord, 293. 
Banner, never fight under that, 97. 
Baptizing converts, 89. 
Bar, examination for admission 
to the, 200. 

failure at, 46, 87, 119, 174, 267, 
281, 540. 

nuisance to the, 393. 

prisoner at the, 460. 

success at the, 46, 87, 119, 174, 
267, 281, 540. 
Barbour, James, 36. 
Bargain, clinches the, 481. 
Bark at me, they, 426. 
Barley, good for, 486. 
Barnes, W. H. L., 113, 451, 484. 
Barrington, Sir Jonah, 363. 
Barrister, briefless, 288, 454. 

a bullying, 447. 

shall not forget I am a, 536. 
Bartlett, Ichabod, 325. 
Barton, George W., 435. 
Basis, whose art the, 290. 
Bates, Edward, 37. 
Bayonet, used a, 466. 
Beach, William A., 381, 451. 
Beastly bellowings, 372. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 239. 
Beef, hung, 363. 
Before, stated, 442. 
Begbie, Sir Matthew, 512. 
Begins, there tyranny, 281. 
Be just, fear not, 79. 
Believe me or not, 326. 
Belkywings, beastly, 372. 
Bench, looking wise from behind 
the, 254 

once sat on the, 437. 
Benedict, Kirby, 460. 
Bengal tigers, ten thousand, 94. 
Benjamin, Judah P., 37. 



Bennett, George, 435. 
Benton, Thomas H., 39. 
Best has flaw, 290. 

friends, the profession's, 536. 

Justice, 237. 

part of the case, 293. 
Better ninety-and-nin 9, 180, 333. 

pay toll, you had, 537. 

read them, 151. 
Between two lawyers, 289. 
Beware of half knowledge, 46. 

of the day, 421. 
Bigamy, penalty for, 453. 
Bigger fool than the judge, 438. 

place, 506. 
Biggest fool on earth, 438. 
Bill of sale, 226, 385. 

a true. 152. 
Bind them, that will, 487. 
Binnacle, abaft the, 311. 
Birds, king of, 444. 

of prey, 409. 
Bishop greater than judge, 462. 
Black as that man's heart, 54. 

Jeremiah S., 40, 1^6, 217. 

white, 379. 
Blackguard, to the wall, 4^4 
Blackguards, gray-headed, 102. 
Blackleg of the law, 391. 
Black-letter law, 412. 
Blackman, Daniel, 355. 
Blackstone, Sir William, 491. 
Blasphemy, rebuking, 300. 
Bleckley, L. E., 33, 35, 41, 51. 
Blockheads, 47. 
Blots, he blunders and, 536. 
Blunders and blots, he, 536. 
Boatum v. Bullum, 277. 
Bob-tail politician, 234 
Boiler, five-foot, 29a 
Bond, 44 

George, 514 



548 



INDEX. 



Book of nature, 178. 
Books, in the, 443. 

not law, 330. 
Boring, a science, 178. 
Boundaries, state, 90. 

uncertainty of, 37. 
Bourbon, old, 168. 
Bo wen, Lord, 75. 
Box-stall, 497. 
Boyle, Chief Justice, 250. 
Brackenridge, Hugh H., 292. 
Bradley, Joseph P., 45. 
Brady, James T., 46, 333. 
Brain, concussion of the, 447. 
Brains in all shapes, 472. 
Bramwell, Lord, 52, 405, 510. 
Brass, succeeds the age of, 184. 
Brawl for hire, a, 394. 
Braxfield, Lord, 52. 
Breach of promise, 25. 
Breaking, Sabbath, 386. 
Brevity, 49. 

Brewer, David J., 125, 127. 
Brewster, Benjamin H., 54. 
Bribery, 54. 
Brice, Calvin S., 55. 
Brick, found Rome, 58. 
Brief, be, 49. 

for sophistry, 90. 

his first, 306. 

of the law, 90. 
Briefless barrister, 288, 454. 
Brothers, 505. 
Brougham, Lord, 57, 290. 
Brown, David Paul, 129. 

James T., 61. 

Marshall, 254, 281. 
Browne, Irving, 62. 
Brute shyster, 396. 
Brutus, Csesar had his, 235. 
Bubbles of life, 63. 
Buffalo, fool from, 319. 



Bull by the horns, 183. 

-dog, a, 92, 423. 

market, 436. 
Buller, Francis, 63, 196. 
Bullum v. Boatum, 277. 
Bullying barrister, a, 447. 
Bumblethorpe, Judge, -142. 
Burbank, Justice, 527. 
Burglary, 75, 498, 511. 
Burgomaster, 420. 
Burke, James Francis, 63. 
Burke's speech on conciliation, 

384. 
Burleigh, Clarence, 66. 
Burnand, F. C, 200. 
Burr, Aaron, 67. 
Burrowes, Peter, 268. 
Bury them, 364. 
Bushe, Charles Kendal, 67. 
Business at half price, 390. 

dispatching, 356. 

none of his. 137. 
Butler, Benjamin F., 69, 380. 
Buying a parrot, 506. 
Buzfuz, Sergeant, 1. 
By-laws, constitution and, 92. 

living on the, 92. 

Cabinet, only unit in the, 58. 

Cady, Daniel, 73. 

Csesar, had his Brutus, 235. 

Rome had her, 532. 
Cain and Abel, 9. 
Call to-morrow, 267. 
Calvin's Institutes, 479. 
Camp, starvation, 160. 
Campbell, John A., 74. 

Lord, 27, 219, 341, 491. 

St. George Tucker, 524. 
Candidate for doorkeeper, 148. 
Candle of the Lord, 94. 
Can't, never say, 473. 



INDEX. 



549 



Cantilena, repetition of the, 158. 
Capacity, hadn't the, 438. 
Capital punishment, 257. 
Car, in a second-class, 440. 
Carpenter, a jack-leg, 145. 

Matt, 169. 
Carpet-bagger, Yankee, 8. 
Carry jury, witnesses and court, 

187. 
Case, a land, 186. 

best part of, 293. 

does not arise in the, 50. 

for fees he moulds a, 290. 

forgetting the facts in the, 
212. 

happens, when the, 103. 

prima facie, 66. 

rule in Shelley's, 66. 

that the argument fits, a, 389. 

theory of, 522. 

this case that, 460. 

water, 186. 

winning the, 366. 
Cases, seventy-eight, 412. 
Casting a sovereign over the At- 
lantic, 453. 
Castle, house his, 328. 
Catching the accent, 152. 
Catfish, a big, 454. 
Catholic of his age, foremost, 368. 
Cause-getting man, a, 323. 

requires, the least his, 50. 
Causes and effects, 184. 
Cedar and vine, land of, 275. 
Century, sleeping a, 364. 
Cervera at Santiago, 276. 
Chain, no man wear, 403. 
Challenge, 245. 
Chancellor's conscience, 459. 

doubt, 177. 
Chancery practice, 206, 459. 
Channell, Sergeant, 501. 



Chap like yourself, a red-faced, 

446. 
Character for truth and honesty, 
448. 
good, 78. 
Charge of court, 50, 52, 54, 75, 333, 

388, 507. 
Charity for all, with, 294. 
Charta, Magna, 103. 
Chase, Salmon P., 74, 302. 
Chatham, Lord, 328, 411. 
Chelmsford, Lord, 500. 
Chemistry, legislative, 41. 
Child, father of the man, 339. 
Chimney-sweep, 95. 
Chitty, Joseph, 385. 
Choate, Joseph H., 82. 

Rufus, 69, 86, 87, 379, 385, 410, 
472. 
Choosing honest men, 437. 
Chords of memory, the mystic, 

294. 
Chorus of the Union, 294. 
Christian name, his, 504. 
Christianity, no form of, 327. 
Church, intended for the, 152. 
Churchill, Lord, 94 
Ciphers, all, 58. 

one and two, 436. 
Circle, to the end of a, 85. 
Circuit, going the home, 253. 
Circumstances, mitigating, 460. 
Citations, 283. 412, 534. 
Civil law, principle of the, 49L 
Clairborne, Justice, 117. 
Clare, Lord, 95, 151. 
Clarke, Richard, 473. 
Class, a conservative, 402. 
Classical music, 364. 
Clause, the sweeping, 194. 
Clay, Henry, 96, 209, 381, 425. 
thou art the, 198. 



550 



INDEX. 



Clayton, Justice, 434. 

Clearest of all laws, self-defense 

the, 280. 
Clearness, 52. 

Clergyman, Jackson and the, 246. 
Cleveland, Grover, 99. 
Client, a fool for a, 329. 

tickle my, 266. 

unfortunate, 179. 

unthought of, the.. 404. 
Climate, fine, 475. 
Climax, anti, 100. 
Clinches the bargain, 481. 
Clipping his wings, 95. 
Cloak of hypocrisy, 181. 
Clock out of order, 527. 
Clonmell, Lord, 240. 
Close shave, a, 112. 
Clown among lawyers, 303. 

best, 99, 119. 
Clowns, lawyer among, 393. 
Coach-and-six, a, 372. 
Cobbler's gone, the, 47. 
Cobwebs, 281, 402. 
Cockburn, Lord, 101, 145, 250. 
Cockle, Sergeant, 496. 
Code, revising, 31, 218. 
Codeless myriad of precedent, 410. 
Codicils, a few trifling, 5. 

scribbling or scratching some 
new, 536. 
Codification, Gibson on, 218. 
Coelum, ruat, 35, 330. 
Coke, Sir Edward, 35, 103. 
Coleman, Richard H., 103. 
Coleridge, Lord, 104, 199, 404, 453. 
Collection for foreign missions, 

199. 
Colors flying, with my, 533. 
Coit, James D., 164. 
Columbus and Washington, 382. 

discovered by, 382. 



Coming to grief, 105. 
Commission, five per cent., 308. 

of the Lord, 303. 
Committed himself, has not, 503 

to jail, 292. 
Committee, epitaph by vigilance, 

188. 
Common law. a principle of, 101. 

indictment at. 281. 

lawyer, great, 399. 

procedure, 281. 

sense, a diamond-pointed, 422. 

sense, short of, 27. 

sense verdict, 466. 

tribute to, 282. 

what is, 207. 
Comparisons are odious, 329. 
Competency of jurors, 255. 
Competent to examine, 210. 
Competition, patience, 230. 
Compliments, 543. 
Comprehending him, 62. 
Concealing contempt, 116. 
Conceit, disliking sham and, 228. 
Concerned, much, 155. 
Conciliation, Burke's speech on, 

384. 
Concussion of the brain, 447. 
Condescending, truly, 390. 
Condition, his mental, 537. 
Conduct still right, 41. 
Confession, 108. 

Confiding with the honest, be, 129. 
Confused ideas, 92. 

statement of facts, 218, 326. 
Confusing the court, 332. 
Conkling, Roscoe, 85, 376. 
Conscience and equity, 459. 
Conscientious scruples, 256. 
Conscious superiority, 544 
Consent, marriage is made by, 337. 
Conservative class, a, 402. 



INDEX 



551 



Consideration in a contract, 206. 
Considered the point, 514. 
Constitution and by-laws, 92. 
Constitutional questions, settling, 

205. • 
Consultation, in, 153. 
Contempt of court, 62, 110. 241. 
Contingent fee, definition of, 66. 

remainder, like a, 151. 
Continuance, asking for a, 525. 
Contract, consideration in a, 206. 
Contrary to the form of the stat- 
ute, 408. 
Conversion, wrongful, 405. 
Converts, baptizing, 89. 

one of his, 244. 
Convicted for less money, might 

have been, 376. 
Convictions, former, 463. 
Convincing of error, 293. 
Cooley, Thomas M., 52. 
Coram non judice, 330. 
Cork and feathers, all, 253. 
Corn, big, 165. 

Corrupts, unlimited power, 281. 
Corwin, Thomas, 118. 
Costs, dismissed Hades with, 187. 

on, peg to hang, 327. 
Coudert, Frederick R, 119. 
Council of Falaise, 291. 
Counsel, interrupting, 435, 517, 
535. 

of guilt, the, 394. 

the successful, 123. 
Counterfeit money, passing, 389. 
Counting present, 429. 
Country lawyer, a, 73. 
Countryman between two law- 
yers, a, 289. 
Counts but the sands, 50. 
Court, admitting yourself out of, 
327. 



Court, always please the, 385. 

and its little wits, 90. 

carry jury, witnesses and, 18£ 

charge of, 50, 52, 54, 75, 333, 
388, 507. 

confusing the, 332. 

contempt of, 62, 110, 241. 

demanding attention of, 74> 
83, 236. 

echo in the, 68. 

fallibility of, 33. 

first correct decision of the, 
241. 

infallibility of, 33. 

interrupting counsel, 435, 517, 
535. 

listen and learn, 74 
. make an excellent, 533. 

not afraid of any, 322. 

of errors, 207. 

opening the, 504. 

order in the, 333. 

privateer of the, 393. 

reversing the lower, 208. 

United States Supreme, 90, 
124, 225. 

what is the supreme, 207. 

will understand it, perhaps, 62. 
Courts, fallibility of, 33. 

of law, 288. 
Cox, Sergeant, 127. 
Crafty, be shrewd with the, 129. 
Creation, the mute, 195. 
Creature, a small insignificant, 

330. 
Credit, pledging all his, 153. 
Creditors' letters, 216. 
Creed, loyalty our national, 346. 
Cried, the devil, 186. 
Crime, attorney-general of, 394 
Criminal procedure, 203, 281. 

to-day, make a, 290. 



552 



INDEX. 



Criminals, defending, 97. 
Criticising Shakespeare, 101. 
Crop of fight, a small, 143. 
Cross-examination, 53, 129, 394, 

509. 
Crossing the stream, 301. 
Crowded with incompetents, 159. 
Crowle, Sergeant, 434. 
Crown, for the half, 377. 
Crowns, 431, 458. 
Cry, little wool, all, 143. 
Cultivate a simple style, 543. 
Cunning, forget its, 368. 
Curator, 312. 
Cured of stuttering, 506. 
Curl, Hyperion's, 86. 
Curran, John P., 95, 115, 148, 308, 

343, 485. 
Czar, rivaling a, 117, 431. 

Damages, 224, 327. 
Davis, David, 127. 
Davy, William, 153. 
Daw, no wiser than a, 280. 
Day, Justice, 442. 

Wm. R, 155. 
Days may be long, that his, 69. 
Dead-heat, a, 364 
Deaf and stupid, old, 533. 

very, 261. 
Deal as you like, 500. 
Death, new pang to, 534. 
Debt, the national, 253, 533. 
Deceit and fraud, 208, 330. 
Deceive the crowd, may, 379. 
Decide, never give reasons, 41. 
Deciding, trouble, 260. 
Decision, Dred Scott, 224. 

first correct, 241. 

latest, 451. 

may be right, 41, 310. 
Decisis, stare, 34 



Declamation, loose, 379. 
Declaration, demurring to, 62. 
Declining a verb, 147. 
Deed, in indenture or, 184 

uncertain description, 37. 

without a name, 268. 
De facto and de jure, 156. 
Defects in the jury system, 264 
Defence, self, 280. 
Defend the cause of liberty, 411. 

wrong, never, 300. 
Defending criminals, 97. 

the tariff, 417. 
Defined, statesman, 430. 
Defining nothing, 136. 
Delays of justice, 309. 
Delenda est Carthago, 330. 
Delusion, a mockery and a snare, 
a, 158. 

had a singular, 537. 
Demanding attention of the court, 

74, 83, 236. 
Demands, quibbling, 481. 
Demerara team, 114 
De minimis non curat lex, 158. 
Democratic, jury went, 512. 
Demurrer, 62, 156, 194, 207. 
Denman, Lord, 77, 158. 
Depew, Chauncey M., 82, 158. 
Descent and purchase, 40. 
Description, uncertainty in, 37. 
Desertion, 162. 
Despatching business, 356. 
Despising cant, hypocrisy and 
sham, 429. 

technicalities, 178. 
Destroyed, must be, 330. 
Devil, cried, the, 186. 

his due, 331. 

plea of the, 71. 
Diagrams, illustrating by, 62. 
Die, never say, 90. 



INDEX. 



553 



Die on the floor, 372. 

what is the gain, 179. 
Dies with the person, a personal 

action, 329. 
Differ about the trimming, 459. 
Difference, splitting the, 487, 511. 
Different stories, 446. 
Dignity, speaking of, 115. 
Diligence, due, 286. 
Dillard, John Henry, 440. 
Dine, that jurymen may, 515. 
Dinners, New England Society, 82. 
Diploma, 475. 
Diplomatic, 155. 
Directors, flaying the, 94 
Discourage litigation, 304. 
Discovered by Columbus, 332. 
Dismissed Hades with costs, 187. 
Dispensing with justice, 305. 
Display of learning, undue, 490. 
Distributive justice, 405. 
Divorce, 161. 338. 
Docket, stricken from, 250. 
Docking an entail, 228. 
Doctrine, heavy, 167. 
Dodged all good, 331. 
Dogma of future punishment, 186. 
Dogs and all, the little, 426. 
Doing, what have you been, 508. 
Dollar, 199. 

Domain, eminent, 224 
Done, half, 390. 

let justice be, 330. 
Donkey, accent on, 141. 

his lordship, the, 496. 

inspector, a, 420. 

obstinacy in a, 197. 
Donovan, J. W., 380, 481. 
Dooly, John M., 165. 
Doorkeeper, candidal for, 148. 
Doubt, chancellor's, 177. 

solving the, 43. 



Doubts, had no, 478. 
Douglas, Stephen A., 167, 294 
Down, strike when, 485. 
Dowse, Richard, 168, 212. 
Dream, past rises like a, 239. 
Dred Scott decision, 224 
Driest speech of the session, 151. 
Drink Scotch, 452. 
Driscoll, Timothy, 372. 
Dropping his h's, 501. 

the watermelon, 484 
Drummond, Thomas, 169. 
Drunk from absorption, 418. 
Dry speech, a, 151. 
Dudley, Justice, 78. 
Due, devil his, 331, 

diligence, 286. 
Duel, 167, 244, 425, 444 
Duffy, seeing, 448. 
Dull, very, 307. 

Dullness, inoculated with, 434 
Duluth, 269. 
Duo fulmina belli, 83. 
Dust in his eyes, 391. 
Duty to live unspotted, 74 

Ear, practice entirely by, 99. 

Early rising, 313, 455. 

Ears, deaf in both, 261. 

Earth, shall not perish from the, 

294 
Easily apprehended, 363. 
East, wise men from the, 253. 
Ecclesiastical patronage, 173. 
Echo in court, 68. 
Edition, second, 308. 
Effect, in full force and, 5. 
Effecting a recovery, 228. 
Effects, causes and, 184 
Egotism, 43. 
Either, never be, 430. 
Ejectment, action of, 486. 



554 



INDEX. 



Eked it out, with law, 27. 
Eldon, Lord, 114, 169, 220. 
Elevation of the host, 67. 
Ellenborough, Lord, 178, 338, 472. 
Elm, a tough, 313. 
Eloquence, Choate's, 87. 

fountain of, 382. 

is in the man, 378. 

tangled, 179. 
Eloquent appeals, 17, 422. 
Else, little, 398. 
Embezzlement, 94. 
Emerson or Pythagoras, 83. 
Eminent authorities, 284. 

domain, 224. 
Emperor an ass, 440. 
Employed as a surgeon, 178. 
Enamel, none of your, 251. 
Encroaching on eternity, 102. 
Endless punishment, 304 
Ends, where law, 281. 
Enemies, but two, 430. 
England Society Dinners, New, 
82, 160. 

worst judge in, 534 
English, good, 439. 

in plain, 173. 
Entail, docking an, 228. 
Epigram, 183. 
Episcopalian, an, 300. 
Epitaph, 186, 197, 331. 
E pluribus unum, 247. 
Epoch, silurian, 399. 
Equal to it, 68. 

show, an, 504 
Equator, 250. 
Equitable mortgage, 202. 

position an, 410. 
Equity, 288. 

a roguish thing, 459. 

a rule of, 101. 

flexibility of law and, 176. 



Equity, what is, 206. 

Erie, Lord, 189. 

Error, assignments of, 32. 

convincing of, 293. 

great and glaring, 35. 

unrepentant, 330. 
Errors, court of, 207. 

full of, 308. 
Erskine, Harry, 489. 

John, 189. 

Lord, 131, 184, 191, 382, 384. 
Escape, a narrow, 306. 

let no innocent man, 334 

ninety-and-nine, 180, 333. 
Esher, Lor J, 33. 
Eskgrove, Lord, 260. 
Estate, rescuing your, 290. 

what is a fee-simple, 206. 
Eternity, encroaching on, 102. 
Evangelical, not, 304. 
Evarts, William M., 198, 453. 
Evidence, hearsay, 232. 

held on no, 473. 

in accordance with the, 515. 

some, 76. 
Examination for admission to the 
bar, 200. 

cross, 129, 394 
Examine, competent to, 210. 
Excellent court, make an, 533. 
Excepting his honor, 181. 
Exceptions, 35. 
Excessive seizure, 405. 
Exculpation, 452. 
Excuse, an intemperate, 242. 
Excuses no one, 333. 
Exhibits, 212. 

Existence nor origin, neither, 183. 
Ex nudo pacto, 207. 
Expenses, half the, 91. 
Experience and skill, science, &, 

speaking from, 435. 



INDEX. 



555- 



Experience, with a little more, 96. 
Expert, 38, 210. 
Extorted by threats, 109. 
Eyes, dust in his, 391. 

Face, smiles in your, 340. 
Facts, forgotten the, 212. 

in order, 327. 

not in accordance with the, 
512, 

statement of, 309, 404, 429, 533. 

winning on, 399. 
Fagots, 388. 
Failure at the bar, 46, 87, 119, 174, 

267, 281, 540. 
Fair play, and an equal show, 504. 

turn about, 342. 
Faith, tolerant of every, 368. 
Falaise, council of, 291. 
Fall, though the heavens, 330. 
Fallibility of courts, 33. 
False, not a word, 326. 

pride, 317. 
Fame follows merit, 476. 

trumpet of, 310. 
Family prayers, 85. 
Farm, thirteen men to steal a, 512. 
Farmer Numskull, 447. 
Farther I go west, the, 253. 
Fashion's sake, not for, 311. 
Fast and loose, playing, 169. 
Fatal facility of speech, 52. 
Fatally wounded, 497. 
Father of man, child, 339. 
Fathers, the Pilgrim, 82. 
Fear not, be just, 79. 

you not, I, 35. 
Federal judiciary, 225. 

Union, our, 247. 
Fee, contingent, 66. 

simple estate, what is a, 206. 
Fees, he moulds a case for, 200. 



Fees, statutory, 212. 

substantial, 154, 282, 376. 

who live upon litigants', 536. 
Fellow to hang you, 169. 
Fenians in court, 469. 
Fiat justitia, 35, 330. 
Field, Stephen J., 214. 
Fight, a small crop of, 143. 

outside judge in the. 254. 

under that banner, never, 97. 
Fine as Thurber's turkey, 100. 

climate, 475. 
Firing at a wig, 361. 
Firmness in a king, 197. 

the right, with, 294. 
First brief, his, 306. 
Fish, a big cat-, 454 
Fit for a judge to do, 103. 
Fits, a case that the argument,. 

389. 
Fitter for the steeple, 152. 
Fitzgibbon, Lord, 153. 
Flag, one, 346. 

that does not follow the, 88. 
Flash in the pan, a, 98. 
Flaw, best has, 290. 
Flaying the directors. 94 
Floodgates of the understandings 

189. 
Fly, honesty, 185. 
Follow one flag, we, 346. 
Following the profession, 394 
Folly, wisdom led by, 98. 
Food or light, without, 259. 
Fool, 219. 

all the people, 295. 

for a client, a, 329. 

from Buffalo, 319. 

from the poorest, 99. 

old, 439. 

on earth, biggest, 438. 

than the judge, bigger, 438. 



556 



INDEX. 



Foolery governs the world, 459. 
Foolish questions, asking, 404. 
Foolishness, opinion for the, 90. 
Fools, all men, 438. 
Force and effect, in full, 5. 

of habit, 387, 490. 
Foreign missions, collection for, 

199. 
Forensic oratory, canon of, 18. 
Forever, now and, 523. 
Forgery, 211. 

Forgetting it, no danger, 445. 
Forgiveness, 371. 
Forgotten much, I have not, 343. 

the facts, 212. 
Form of statute, contrary to, 408. 
Former convictions, 453. 
Forms, passing in review, sacred, 

149. 
Fought at Gettysburg, 126. 
Found Rome brick, 58. 
Foundation of wit, 193. 
Fountain of eloquence, 382. 
Fragment, a Socratic, 133. 
Fraud, 208, 330. 
Fraud and deceit, 208, 330. 

defined, 208. 

upon the profession, a, 393. 
Freak, an anomalous, 16. 
Freedom, a new birth of, 294. 

synonym of, 294. 
Freeholder, are you a, 257. 
Friday, Good, 154. 
Friends, the profession's best, 536. 

to keep your, 413. 
From the poorest fool, 99. 
Front or rear, who goes to, 254. 
Fuller, Melville W., 127. 
Fullerton, William, 129. 

Gadfly be, let the, 303. 
Gain, sordid activity of, 282. 



Gain, what is the. 179. 

Gallows, the gaol supplied the, 

281. 
Garland, A. H., 215. 
Garrow, Counselor, 183. 
Gay, grave or, 536. 
Gazed, and still they, 81. 
General reputation, 448. 
Genius at truth-telling, 155. 
Gentleman, addressing a, 144 

no, 443. 

of color, a, 108. 
Gentlemen of the long robe, 288. 
Georgia justice, charge of a, 81. 
Gettysburg, fought at, 26. 
Gibraltar, like the rock of, 180. 
Gibbs, Chief Justice, 77. 
Gibson, John Bannister, 32, 217. 
Gift, oratory a natural, 382. 
Give all freely, I, 538. 

the devil his due. 331. 

us the grain, 50. 
Gladsome light of jurisprudence, 

103. 
Gloag, Sergeant, 435. 
Glorious uncertainty, 340. 
Glory of our institutions, 402. 
God's side, one on, 403. 
Golden rules, 118, 129, 468. 

treasury, 541. 
Gone to kingdom come, 89. 

yet, not, 439. 
Good character, 78. 

dodged all, 331. 

English, 439. 

for barley, 486. 

Friday, 154. 

ratter, a, 505. 

talker, 506. 
Gordian knots, 536. 
Gordon, Lord George, 130. 
Gospel, a minister of the, 246. 



INDEX. 



557 



Gould, Jay, 56. 

Justice, 155. 
Government of the people, 294 
Governor, talking to the, 230. 
Governs the world, foolery, 459. 
Gowns, 219, 435. 
Grady, Barrirter, 364. 
Graham, Justice, 467. 
Grain, give us the, 50. 
Grammar and logic, 355, 504 
Grant, Sir William, 223. 
Grave or gay, 536. 
Great ass in judicial robes, 435. 

common lawyer, 399. 

feel that he is, 91. 

lawyer, who's a, 50. 

liars, handling, 166. 

mind, his, 237. 

Peter the, 287. 

speech is one thing, 379. 
Greater contains the less, 340. 

Jew, 312. 

the libel, 341. 

truth, 341. 
Greatest lawyer in Illinois, 348. 

liar, the, 506. 
Greek and Latin, 61, 543. 
Greeley, Horace, 39. 
Grey, Justice, 358. 
Grief, coming to, 105. 
Grier, Robert G, 224 512. 
Grosscup, P. S., 225. 
Grows more loud, as it, 379. 
Gruff judge, a, 442. 
Grundy, Felix, 97. 
Guess, the last, 207. 
Guilt, the counsel of, 394 
Guilty, brings them all in, 514 

escape, 333, 334 
Gushed forth, streams of revenue, 
523. 



Habit, force of, 387, 490. 

judicial, 490. 
Habits abandoned, 194 
Hades with costs, dismissed, 187. 
Hair, putting on more, 505. 
Half-crown, for the, 377. 

done, 390. 

seas over, 311. 

the expenses, 91. 
Haliburton, Thomas C., 223. 
Hall, William M., 220. 
Hallett, Justice, 18. 
Halsbury, Lord, 105. 
Halt, 309. 

Haman, hung them as high as, 249. 
Hammond, EH S., 75. 
Hampton, Moses, 40. 
Hand for everybody, a, 363. 

forget its cunning, 368. 
Hands in his pockets, 198. 

with the jury, shaking, 437. 
Handwriting, 76. 
Hang a thief when young, 49. 

costs on, peg to, 327. 

wretches, 515. 

you, fellow that's going to, 169. 
Hanged, all but his lordship, 236. 

if I don't, 193. 
Hanging judge, 361. 

on, 439. 
Hannen, Lord, 263. 
Happened, it just, 240. 
Happens, when the case, 103. 
Hardwicke, Lord, 281. 
Harlan, John IL, 126. 
Harrington, Theophilus, 226, 458. 
Harvard professor, a, 73. 
Hat, the same, 369. 
Hathaway, Samuel G., 226. 
Hawkins, Henry, 229, 366. 
Hazards, carry the jury at all, 93. 



558 



INDEX. 



Head, in his sound old, 254. 

lost his, 303. 

nothing but the, 152. 

that one small, 81. 

when he shakes his, 153. 
Heads of the manifesto, 251. 
Heavens fall, though the, 331. 
Heel, justice with leaden, 464. 
Hear both sides, 331. 

him rave, 538. 

nothing, 218. 

nothing of either, 501 

you, bound to, 179. 
Hearsay, 232. 
Heart for nobody, a, 363. 

fountain of eloquence, 382. 
Heartless old heptagon, 375. 
Heaven, the keys of, 149. 
Heavens fall, though the, 330. 
Heavy doctrine, 167. 
Held on no evidence, 473. 
Henry, Patrick, 208, 234, 350. 
Heptagon, heartless old, 375. 
Here lies John Shaw, 186. 
Hermand, Lord, 291. 
Hermit, living like a, 171. 
Heywood, Samuel, 187. 
Hide wisdom, manners, 472. 
High as Haman, 249. 
Higher nature, things of a, 342. 
Highway robbery, 462. 
Hilarity, a little honest, 189. 
Hill, George, 313, 411, 412. 

Walter B., 360. 
Hinted, quoted and, 27. 
Hire, a brawl for, 394. 
Hiring a lawyer, jury, 76. 
History, upon matters of, 303. 
Hitchcock, Peter, 235. 
Hoar, George F., 71, 284, 433. 
Hocus-pocus science, law a, 340. 



Hodman, no notion of turning, 

151. 
Holland, Baron, 261. 
Holt, Lord, 236. 
Honest as he is shrewd, 295. 

hilarity, a little, 189. 

judge, what is an, 208. 

lawyer, here lies an, 186. 

man. an, 367. 

men, two, 390. 
Honesty, fly, 185. 

reputation for, 448. 
Honor, a high sense of, 300, 

has me, now your, 228. 
Honor's law, different from his, 

62. 
Honyman, Justice, 53. 
Hoosier law, 432. 
Hope of the oppressed, the, 346. 
Horns, bull by the, 183. 

of the moon, 317. 
Horse derier, a, 143. 

trade, a, 297. 

working like a, 171. 
Horses, swapping, 301. 
Hospitality, 362. 
Host, elevation of the, 67. 
Hour, working by the, 521. 
House, his castle, 328. 

of Representatives, 432. 
How, art of knowing, 291. 
Huddleston, Baron, 143. 
Humanity, miserable atom of, 482. 
Humble origin, his, 501. 
Hundred judges, a, 436. 

ninety-nine in a, 501. 
Hung beef, 363. 

them as high as Haman, 249. 
Hungry judges, the, 515. 
Hunt, Ward H., 126. 
Hurrah for Jackson, 415. 



INDEX 



559 



Husband and wife, 41. 

her second, 84. 
Hyperion curl, 86. 
Hypocrisy, cloak of, 181, 429. 
Hypocritical saint, a, 77. 

Id certum est, 361. 
Idea, never an, 173. 
Ideas, confused, 92. 
Idiot, an, 112. 
Ignoramus, 152. 
Ignorance of the law, 333. 
Illinois, greatest lawyer in, 348. 
Illustrating by diagrams, 62. 
Illustration, a simple, 98. 
Imagination, wings to his, 61. 
Imitator, an, 446. 
Imperishable, fresh, green and, 

157. 
Impossibilities, the law and, 342. 
Impossible, 180. 
Imprisonment, illegal, 77. 
Improbable, highly, 180. 
Improper sentence, 467. 
Impulse, the pupil of, 41. 
Impunity, with, 181. 
Inadmissible, 325. 
Incarnation of piety and virtue, 

77. 
Incog, traveling, 241. 
Income tax, avoiding the, 74 
Incompetents, crowded with, 159. 
Incorporated, ought to be, 436. 
Incumbrance, notice of a, 201. 
Indecision, noted for, 177. 
Indenture or deed, in, 184. 
Index, 237. 

Indictment at common law, 281. 
bill of, 152. 

for words spoken, 204 
Infallibility of courts, 33. 
Infernal contempt for it, 113. 



Inflexible justice, 317. 
Information for larceny, 6. 
Informer, 289. 
Ingersoll, Robert G., 237. 
Inheritance, a small, 175. 

tax, trying to escape the, 250. 
Innocent man escape, let no, 334 

men, ninety-and-nine, 180, 333. 

never thought of it, 326. 

think you, 466. 
Inoculated with dullness, 434 
Insane expert, 210. 
Insanity, 210. 
Inseparable, one and, 523. 
Insignificant creature, a small, 

330. 
Inspector, a donkey, 420. 
Instances, wilderness of single, 

410. 
Institutes, Calvin's, 479. 
Institutions, glory of our, 402. 
Insured, fully, 4 
Intemperance, 5, 25, 177, 240, 413, 

417. 
Interminable arguments, 60. 
Interrupting counsel, 435, 517, 535. 
Irish, when both sides are, 260. 

tenantry, 200. 
Issue, general and special, 206. 

two sides to, 332. 

Jackanapes, 307. 
Jackson, Andrew, 244 

hurrah for, 415. 

John J., 249. 

Handle, 178. 
Jail, committed to, 292L 
Jefferson, Thomas, 209. 
Jeffrey, Francis, 145, 250. 
Jeffreys, George, 251. 
Jekyll, Joseph, 184, 187, 253, 331, 



560 



INDEX. 



Jeremiah, lamentations of, 40. 
Jerrold, Douglas, 280. 
Jew, the greater, 312. 
Job, honorable mention, 230. 
Johnson, Andrew, 253. 
Join to no party, we, 88. 
Jolly testator, 536. 
Judge, an excellent, 533. 

bigger fool than the, 438. 

bishop greater than a, 4C2. 

district, 391. 

function of a, 133. 

gruff, 442. 

hanging, 361. 

improper manner of a, 110. 

lays down the law, 281. 

make a slow, 325. 

more stupid, every, 92. 

outside, 254. 

pompous, 472. 

sail in, why should the, 254. 

soap the, 514. 

sober as a, 240. 

strict, 391. 

stupid, 92, 533. 

that keeps out of the fight, 
254. 

to do, fit for a, 103. 

what is an honest, 208. 

woman the best, 199. 

worst in England, 534. 
Judges, a hundred, 436. 

interrupting counsel, 435, 517, 
535. 

of the law and the facts, 514. 

repartee, 438. 

retort, 438. 

sleeping, 294, 432. 

sneeze, when the, 410. 

stupid, 92, 533. 

the hungry, 515. 



Judicial ability, acme of, 218. 

habit, 490. 

robes, a great ass in, 435. 
Judiciary, the federal, 225. 
Jug, danger of losing the, 244. 
Juries, several kinds. 207. 
Jurisprudence, gladsome light of, 

103. 
Juror, thirteenth, 254, 489. 
Jurors, a light to, 36. 

competency of, 255. 
Jury, at all hazards, carry the, 93. 

charge to, 50, 52, 54, 75, 333, 
388, 507. 

hiring a lawyer, 76. 

need not go to the, ^14. 

on the, 45, 258. 

riveting attention of, 18. 

sat on the, 212. 

shaking hands with the, 437. 

system, defects in the, 204. 

went Democratic, 512. 

will prejudice the, 536. 

witnesses and court, carry, 
187. 
Juryman, a plain, 514. 

thirteenth, 489. 
Just at the bottom, 185. 

at the top, 185. 

before, never, 434. 

fear not, be, 79. 
Justice, administration of, 356. 

and law, 102. 

be clone, let, 330. 

but little, 102. 

charge of a Georgia, 81. 

delays of, 309. 

dispensing with, 305. 

distributive, 405. 

inflexible, 317. 

of the peace, a, 81. 



INDEX. 



561 



Justice with a leaden heel, 464 
Justinian, pandects of, 491. 
Justitia fiat, 330. 

Karnes, Lord, 266. 
Kansas zephyr, a, 519. 
Kelley, William D., 266. 
Kennedy, John P., 285. 
Kent, James, 476. 
Kenyon, Lord, 130, 267, 343. 
Keogh, William, 211, 26a 
Keys of heaven, 149. 
Killed Abel, when Cain, 9. 
Killing the truth, 413. 
King, firmness in a, 197. 
Kingdom come, gone to, 89. 
Kirkpatrick, Andrew, 458. 
Kitchen, Lent in the, 267. 
Kites, 408. 
Knots an hour, seven, 363. 

Gordian, 536. 
Knott, J. Troctor, 269. 
Knotty case, 290. 
Know no North, I, 96. 

ye the land of cedar and vine, 
275. 
Knowing he is ugly, 91. 

how, art of, 291. 
Knowledge, beware of half, 46. 

subtracting from, 430. 
Knows little enough, 507. 
Ku-Klux troubles, 8. 

Labor, all things full of, 87. 
Lachand, Maitre, 20. 
Laches, without, 286. 
Ladies, long, 510. 
Lamb and sheep, 196. 

grows, older a, 196. 
Lamentations of Jeremiah, 40. 
Land case, a, 186. 

law of the, 476. 
1,1/ 36 



Land of cedar and vine, 275. 

of song and story, 476. 
Landmarks on the seashore, 491. 
Landseer, Sir Edwin, 101. 
Languages, same in all, 173. 
Lapsed, is the legacy, 537. 
Larceny case, charge in a, 82. 

information for, 6. 

what constitutes, 204 
Larry in court, 491. 
Later decision, 451. 
Latin and Greek, 61, 543. 
Latitude and longitude, 93. 
Law, 277. 

and equity, 176. 

and facts, 514 

and impossibilities, 342. 

as a jackanapes, as much, 307.. 

blackleg of, 391. 

black-letter, 412. 

books, not, 330. 

brief of the, 90. 

but little justice, 102. 

case, 533. 

citations, 288. 

defined, 67, 207, 277. 

different from his honor's, 63". 

eked it out with, 27. 

ends, where, 281. 

for revenue only, 289. 

for the rich, 338. 

glorious uncertainty of, 340. 

here, feel my, 291. 

hocus-pocus science, 340. 

Hoosier, 432. 

ignorance of the, 333. 

in the books, 443. 

judge lays down the, 281. 

lawless science of the, 410. 

lecture, notes for a, 304 

limb of the, 186. 

maritime, 293. 



562 



INDEX 



Law, a measure for, 459. 

mere repetition not, 158. 

nine points of the, 339. 

of right reason, 291. 

of strikes, 185. 

of the land, 476. 

old spider of the, 281. 

plenty of, 102. 

procedure, common, 281. 

quibbling over a, 169. 

rudiments of the, 125. 

scarecrows of, 280. 

school, does not keep a, 235. 

science of our, 410. 

sharp quillets of, 280. 

Studying. 43. 

suit, specimen of a modern, 
157. 

that is not the, 75, 325. 

to succeed in the, 87, 119, 174, 
267. 

tribute to the common, 282. 

victory in, 50. 

where to find the, 443. 

with every sort of. 50. 
Lawrence, William, 283. 
Laws, clearest of all, 280. 
Lawyer, a country, 73. 

among clowns, 393. 

an honest man, 186. 

great common, 399. 

here lies an honest, 186. 
Lawyer among clowns, a, 393. 

a sound, 439. 

hints to the young, 281. 

his own, 329. 

in Illinois, greatest, 348. 

jury hiring a, 76. 

of the south, 350. 

pompous, 437. 

rescues your estate, 290. 

who matches a, 289. 



Lawyer, who's a great. 50. 
Lawyers, 285. 

countryman between two, 
289. 

didn't make it, 28a 

old, 285. 

share, 446. 

taking snuff, 410. 

the rascals, 78. 

when a knotty case was o'er, 
290. 
Lay and set, 409. 
Leaden heel, justice with a, 464 
Leaders, referring to the, 97. 
Leading questions, 500. 
Lear, in the condition of old, 426. 
Learn, court will, 74 
Learning o'er, a tedious tale of, 50. 

undue display of, 490. 
Least his cause requires, the, 50. 
Lecture, notes for a law, 304 
Led by folly, wisdom, 98. 
Lee, George H., 290. 
Left, over the, 116. 
Legacy lapsed, is the, 537. 
Legal mechanics, 42, 218. 

profession, following, 394 

rights of wife, 41. 

tender act, 205. 
Legend of a Dublin trial, 419. 
Legislation, 291. 
Legislative chemistry, 41. 
Lent in the kitchen, 267. 
Leonard, Abiel, 330. 
Less, contains the, 340. 
Let justice be done, 330. 

r.o innocent man escape, 334. 

the gadfly be, 303. 
Letter of recommendation, 507. 

Stanton's sharp, 301. 

Wirt's golden, 541. 
Letters, creditor's, 216. 



INDEX 



563 



Levy, Sampson, 209, 292. 

Liar, be a thunderbolt to the, 1£9. 

the greatest, 506. 
Liars, handling great, 166. 
Libel and slander, 196. 

greater the, 341. 
Liberty and union, 523. 

of the press, 196. 

reservoir of Roman, 181. 

to defend the cause of, 411. 
License, selling without, 289. 
Lie ever told, peskiest, 159. 

on this side, 439. 

swearing to a, 366. 
Lien, 293. 
Lies an honest lawyer, 186. 

John SLavv, here, 186. 

like a dog, 413. 
Life, bubbles of, 63. 

for his natural, 460. 
Light, by no reflected, 472. 

in pursuit of, 529. 

of jurisprudence, gladsome, 
103. 

to jurors, a, 36. 

without food or, 259. 
Like a balloon, 412. 

a cjream, past, 239. 

a fish between two cats, 289. 

marble statues, 181. 

rock of Gibraltar, 180. 

scaling the Alps, 46. 
Limb of the law, 186. 
Limit fix, no, 538. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 141, 143, 211, 

294, 481. 
Line, state, 90. 

Lined, lawyers' robes are, 290. 
Liquidation, going into, 413. 
Listen, if the court will, 74 
Listener, a good, 218. 



Litigants, fees, who live upon, 536. 

obstinacy of, 290. 
Litigation, discourage, 304. 

ornithology of, 42. 

records of small, 42. 

stirring up, 304. 
Little else, 398. 

enough, knows, 507. 

honest hilarity, a, 189. 

inheritance, a, 175. 

justice, but, 102. 

quibbling demands, 481. 

wits, court and its, 90. 

wool, all cry, 143. 
Live like a hermit, 171. 

upon litigants' fees, 536. 
Living unspotted, 74 
Lochiel, 421. 
Lockwood, Sir Frank, 305. 

Rufus A., 432. 
Logic, 307, 355. 

and grammar, 355, 504 

of special pleading, 404 

reading from a work on, 355. 
Long arguments, 60, 168, 185. 
Longitude and latitude, 93. 
Looking wise, 254 
Loomis, A. W., 308. 
Loose declamation, 379. 

playing fast and, 169. 
Lord, candle of the, 94 

commission of the, 303. 

nurture and admonition of 
the, 86. 
Lordship, all hanged but his, 236. 
Lose your temper, do not, 129. 
Lost his head, 303. 

its little wits, 90. 
Loud, as it grows more, 379. 
Louder, 319. 
Lower regions, 475. 



564: 



INDEX. 



Lowry, Justice, 330. 
Loyalty, our national creed, 346. 
Lucid in order, 49. 
Lucky, always, 490. 
Lumpkin, Joseph H., 33. 
Lungs, for strength of, 289. 

MacNally, Leonard, 308. 
Magna Charta, 103. 
Majesty, his satanic, 287. 
Majority, one on God's side, a, 403. 
Makes his own will, 536. 
Malice towards none, with, 294. 
Man, child father of, 339. 

in wit a, 314 

of straw, a, 327. 

or negro, white, 297. 

self-made, 505. 
Manifesto, heads of, 251. 
Manners often hide wisdom, 472. 

teaching, 173. 
Mansfield, Lord, 41, 259, 309, 331, 

340, 412, 501. 
Man's house his castle, 328. 
Manson, Edward, 133. 
Mare's nests, 183. 
Margins, on, 436. 
Maritime law, 293. 

powers, we, 365. 
Mark, altering the, 292. 
Market, a bull, 436. 
Marriage, 164, 213, 337, 338, 444. 
Marshall, John, 225, 314 

Thomas F., 112, 319. 

Thomas M., 320. 
Martin, John I, 17. 

Sir Samuel, 53. 
Mason, Jeremiah, 323. 
Master in chancery, 207. 
Mastering the lawless science, 410. 
Match the testator, couldn't, 536. 
Matches a lawyer, who, 289. 



Mattacks, John, 206. 

Maule, George, 76, 77, 82, 826, 338, 

466, 511. 
Maxims, 158, 327. 
Maynard, Sir John, 2Z2, 343. 
McCallum, Justice, 26. 
McCartney, William EL, 343. 
McKinley, William, 346. 
McLaws, William R, 329. 
McSweeny, John, 23. 
Meaning, might determine the, 

184. 
Means what he says, 155. 
Meant to be understood, 437. 
Measure, for law, a, 459. 
Mechanics, legal, 42, 218. 
Melodies, identical, 141. 
Melody, what is a, 147. 
Memory, mystic chords of, 294. 
Men from the east, wise, 253. 

honest, 390. 

of Kochester, 532. 

self-made, 402. 
Menagerie, no, 254. 
Mental condition, his, 537. 
Merciful to the young, be, 129. 
Merger of a term, 179. 
Merit, fame follows, 476. 
Merits, worst has, 290. 
Merritt, Thomas, 348. 
Messis sequitur sementem, 337. 
Metaphor, talking, 343. 
Methodist, a, 300. 
Mill, a smoky, 497. 
Mill-dam, 484. 
Miller, Samuel F., 124 
Mind, his great, 237. 

reading, 118. 

resting his, 433. 
Minister of religion, a, 246, 327. 
Minutes, speaking to the, 356. 
Mirehouse, Sergeant, 348. 



INDEX 



565 



Misdirected appeals, 48. 
Miserable atom of humanity, 482. 
Mis-fits, 125, 159. 

-trial, 79. 
Missing, the ass, 445. 
Missions, collection for foreign, 

199. 
Missouri reports, only, 330. 
Mistake, where he made a, 125. 
Mistakes of the war, 13. 
Mitigating circumstances, 460. 
Mockery, a, 158. 

Mode of stating everything, 404. 
Modern law-suit, specimen of a, 

157. 
Money, for less, 376. 

passing counterfeit, 389. 

paying over the, 308. 
Montague, Hill, 349. 
Moon, hoi-is of the, 317. 
Moonlight, by, 142. 
Morris, Lord, 351. 
Mortgage, 20"!, 352. 
Mortuary state, in a. 35. 
Moses in the wilderness, 40. 
Mother, his only, 181. 
Mothers-in-law, 453. 
Motions, 352. 

Mount, sermon on the, 118. 
Moving to quash the proceedings, 

357. 
Multum in parvo, 247. 
Mum, orator, 148. 
Munster meetings, 368. 
Murder, 408, 460, 466. 
Murphy and arbig M., 319. 
Music, antipathy to, 364. 

classical, 364. 

in his soul, no, 418. 

of the Union, to the, 88. 
Musical accent, 141. 
Must be preserved, 247. 



Mute creation, the, 195. 

Mystic chords of memory, the, 294. 

Name, deed without, 268. 

his Christian, 504 
Napping, not caught, 505. 
National creed, loyalty, our, 346. 

debt, 253, 533. 

resources, rock of our, 523. 
Natural life, for his, 460. 

way, in the, 434. 
Naturalization, 358. 
Nature, book of, 178. 

things of a higher, 342. 
Nautical almanac, 93. 
Navigators, of signal service to, 

491. 
Neaves, Lord, 337, 536. 
Negligence, 500. 
Negro, white man or, 297. 
Ne plus ultra, 247. 
Nervous, made him, 323. 
Nests, mare's, 183. 
Nets, the laws are, 280. 
Never above one story, 476. 

an idea, 173. 

be either, 430. 

give reasons, 41, 310. 

prove a tender made, 183. 

put off until to-morrow, 67. 

siy can't, 473. 

say die, 90. 

stir up litigation, 304 
New crown, ordering a, 431. 

England Society Dinners, 82, 
160. 

trial, motion for, 61, 189, 356. 
Nice points, 494 

sharp quillets of the law, 280. 
Nick, Old, 287. 
Nine points, possession, 339. 
Ninety-and-nine, better, 180, 333. 



566 



INDEX 



Ninety-nine innocent, 180, 333. 

out of a hundred, 501. 
Nisbet, E. A., 360. 
Nisi prius, 63. 
No, yes or, 53, 490. 
Nominal damages, 327. 
Non-commital, 503. 
None of his business, 137. 
Nonsense in him, no, 48. 
Nonsuit, 35, 37, 42. 
Norbury, Lord, 361, 427. 
Norris, Justice, 52. 
North, I know no, 96. 

Lord, 364. 
Norton, Sir Fletcher, 310. 
Notable observation, a, 176. 
Notes for a law lecture, 304. 
Nothing but the head, 152. 

defining, 136. 

hearing, 218. 

in it, 153. 

more novel, 290. 

of either, 504 

pledging, 153. 

telling the truth for, 445. 
Notice, giving, 355. 

of a prior incumbrance, 201. 
Novel application, a, 326. 

nothing more, 290. 
Now and forever, 523. 
Nuisance, 262, 393, 497. 
Numskull, farmer, 447. 
Nurture and admonition of the 

Lord, 86. 
Nye, James W., 365. 

Oath, 366. 

Obeyed, order must be, 480. 
Object of contempt, an, 117. 
Objection, an, 68, 325. 

before passing on the, 433. 



Observation, notable, 176. 

speaking from, 435. 
Observing the rules, 219, 355. 
Obsolete statutes, 411. 
Obstinacy in a donkey, 197. 

of litigants, 290. 
O'Connell, Daniel, 58, 240, 363, 367. 
O'Conner, Justice, 356. 
O'Conor, Charles, 376, 379. 
O'Farrell, Garret, 428. 
O'Grady, Baron, 68, 377. 
O'Leary, Father, 149. 
O'Loghlen, Sir Bryan, 181. 
O'Malley, Justice, 464. 
O'More, Rory, 491. 
O'Reilly, James, 486. 
Odious, comparisons are, 329. 
Office, great thirst for, 508. 

seekers, something for, 302. 
Old ambiguity, 105. 

bourbon, 168. 

deaf and stupid, 533. 

fool gone, 439. 

head, in his sound, 254. 

lawyers, 285. 

Lear, in the condition of, 426. 

Nick, 287. 

parallelogram, 374 

spider of the law, 281. 

woman, who is that, 169. 
Older a lamb grows, 196. 
Omnia Gallia, 12. 
On pleader's tomb, 187. 
One and inseparable, 523. 

and two ciphers, 436. 

at a time, 68. 

flag, 346. 

law for the rich, 338. 

on God's side, 403. 

on his side, the only, 263. 

pound two, 309. 






INDEX. 



567 



One, sixteen-to, 499. 

stage from woolsack, 58. 
Only mare's nests, 183. 

Missouri reports, 330. 

one on his side, 263. 
Onus probandi, 34 
Opening the court, 504, 
Opinion decides the question, my, 
66. 

for foolishness, 90. 

formed an, 256. 

his, 49. 

not formed, 256. 

not reading from the, 293. 
Opposed to capital punishment, 

255, 256. 
Opposition, rats of the, 423. 
Oppressed, the hope of the, 346. 
Orator Mum, 148. 
Oratory, 378, 403. 

a natural gift, 332. 

first canon of forensic, 18. 

of the affidavit, 4. 
Order, chronological, 327. 

clock out of, 527. 

facts in, 327. 

in the court, 333. 

lucid in, 49. 

must be obeyed, 480. 
Ordinance, an, 291. 
Origin, his humble, 501. 

nor existence, neither, 183. 
Original, read the, 479. 
Ornament, not merely for, 324. 
Ornithology of litigation, 42. 
Orphan, an, 25. 

Oswald, James Francis, 33, 385. 
Otis, Harrison Gray, 385, 529. 
Our Federal Union, 247. 

self-made men, 402. 

side, 332. | 



Outside judge, the. 254. 
Over the left, 116. 

turn, 171. 
Oyster, 'twas a fat, 280. 

Page, Justice, 439. 

mention the, 179. 
Palgrave, Sir Francis, 510. 
Pan, a flash in the, 98. 
Pandects of Justinian, 491. 
Papers, testamentary, 537. 
Parallelogram, old, 374. 
Parenthesis, like a long, 150. 
Park, Allan, 110, 387, 404. 
Parker, Amasa J., 476. 
Parliament, act of, 372. 

by privilege of, 309. 
Parrot, buying a, 506. 
Parry, Sergeant, 488. 
Parsons, Theophilus, 379, 385. 
Party, joining to no, 88. 
Pass to Richmond, a, 301. 
Passion, his ruling, 149. 

week, 267. 
Past rises like a dream, 239. 
Pasture, sheep of his, 68. 
Pathos, Curran's, 149. 

Ingersoll's, 239. 
Patience, competition, 230. 
Patients, ask my, 475. 
Patronage, ecclesiastical, 173. 
Paying by the hour, 521. 

over the money, 308. 
Peace and rest, 43. 

triumphant, 346, 
Peg to hang costs on, 327. 
Pen, attributable to his, 200. 
Penalty for bigamy, 453. 
Penuriousness, Kenyon's, 267. 
People, fool all the, 295. 

government of the, 294 



568 



INDEX. 



Perfection of wisdom, 281. 
Perish from the earth, shall not, 

294 
Perkins, Constantino, 333. 

Eli, 389. 
Perrot, Baron, 77. 
Perse vera ndo vinces, 541. 
Person, dies with the, 329. 
Personal action dies with the per- 
son, a, 329. 

and real, 409. 
Peter the Great, 287. 
Peters, John Andrew, 389. 

Richard, 390. 
Petigru, James Louis, 219, 315. 
Petroleum, 2. 
Pettifogger, 21, 391. 
Phillips, John F., 398. 

Wendell, 367, 401. 
Physician, 228, 435, 447, 474 
Picks your pocket, 340. 
Piety and virtue, incarnation of, 

77. 
Pilate, Pontius, 112, 154. 
Pilgrim fathers, 82. 
Pilgrims, unhappy company of, 

82. 
Pitch, 2. 

Place, bigger, 506. 
Plain English, in, 173. 

juryman, a, 514. 

making it, 62. 
Piatt, Thomas, 85. 
Play and an equal show, fair, 504. 
Playing fast and loose, 169. 
Plea in abatement, 207. 
Pleader, a poor, 379. 
Pleader's tomb, on, 187. 

of the devil, 71. 
Pleading, special, 404, 518. 
Pleas, 50, 207, 302, 406. 
Pleasing the court, 385. 



Pledge, temperance, 5. 
Pledging his credit, 153. 
Pliancy of tongue, for, 289. 
Plumber, the, 520. 
Plunket, Lord, 332, 408, 438, 443. 
Pockets, hands in his, 198. 
Point, considered the, 514. 

in the case, the, 522. 
Points, armed at all, 411. 

nice, 404 

understanding the, 262. 
Policeman, affidavit of, 6. 
Political architect, 151. 
Politician, bob-tail, 234 

a successful, 430. 
Politics, his, 507. 

true theory of, 344 
Pollock, Baron, 409. 
Pompous attorney, 437. 

judge, 472. 
Pontius Pilate, 112, 154 
Poor pleader, a, 379. 
Poorest fool, from the, 99. 
Porter, Justice, 468. 
Possession is nine points, 339. 
Possum, a red-eyed, 361. 

Ridge literary society, 382. 
Posterity, speaking for, 97. 
Potomac, across the, 453. 
Potters, we are the, 198. 
Pound, two, one, 309. 
Power corrupts, unlimited, 28L 

of statement, his, 477. 
Powers, maritime, 365. 
Practice, chancery, 206. 

entirely by ear, 99. 

rules of, 219, 355. 
Practicing by ear, 99. 
Practitioners in the old law 
courts, 137. 

the un practicing, 289. 
Prayers, family, 85. 



INDEX. 



569 



Precedent, 303, 410. 
Precepts, 544. 
Precise time, 24. 
Prejudice the jury, will. 536. 
Prentice, George D., 412. 
Prentiss, S. S., 350. 367, 414. 
Present, counting, 429. 
Preserved, must be, 247. 
Presidency, after all hope of the, 

402. 
President, rather be right than be, 

97, 430. 
Press, liberty of the, 196. 
Prey, birds of, 409. 
Price, not worth the, 517. 

of success, 87. 
Pride, false, 317 
Prima facie case, 66. 
Principle of the common law, 101. 

tracing to some, 158, 412. 

wrong in the, 410. 
Principles, not men, 844. 

to common sense, reducing, 
202. 
Prior incumbrance, notice of, 201. 
Prisoner at the bar, 460. 
Privilege of parliament, by, 309. 
Prize-fighter, 471. 
Probandi, onus, 34 
Procedure, common law, 281. 

criminal, 203, 281. 

revising code of, 31, 218. 
Proceedings, staying, 103. 
Procrastination, 267. 
Profession, a fraud upon the, 893. 

crowded with incompetents, 
159. 

following the, 394 
Profession's best friends, the, 536. 
Professor, a Harvard, 73. 
Profuse apologies, 453. 
Progress, every step of, 402. 



Promise, breach of, 25. 

Promptly, decide, 41. 

Proof, no, 502, 

Prosy advocate, a, 442. 

Prove it, 348. 

Punctuation, 184, 419. 

Punishment, dogma of future, 186. 

endless, 304 

opposed to, 255, 256. 
Punning, 193. 
Pupil of impulse, the, 41. 
Purchase and descent, 40. 
Puritan characteristics, 160. 
Pythagoras or Emerson, 83. 

Quarles, J. V., 420. 

James, 211. 
Quash the proceedings, moving to, 

357. 
Quashing the writ, 355. 
Quay, M. S., 344 
Queen's Bench Reports, 326. 
Question, asking himself a, 179. 

of bags, a, 442. 

resolved to repeat the, 378 
Questions, asking foolish, 494 

constitutional, 205. 

leading, 500. 
Quibbling, demands little, 481. 

over a law, 169. 
Quillets of the law, 280. 
Quorum, counting a, 429. 
Quotation, aptness of, 423, 464 

familiar, 464 
Quoted and he hinted, 27. 
Quoting Spanish, 19. 

Railway speed, 500. 
ticket, 214, 515. 
Raine, Sergeant, 184 
Randolph, John, 318, 367, 422. 
Rather be right, 97, 430. 



570 



INDEX 



Ratio, sub-multiple of a duplicate, 

375. 
Rats, did I say ? 423. 
Rave, hear him, 538. 
Read law, I dou't, 99. 

something to, 290. 

the original, 479. 

them, better, 151. 
Reading mind, 118. 

the opinion, not, 293. 

work on logic, 355. 
Real, personal and, 409. 
Reason, by the law of right, 291. 
Reasoning out, a labored length 

of, 50. 
Reasons, never give, 41, 310. 

three, 533. 
Rebels, saving the, 304. 
Rebuking blasphemy, 300. 
Receipt, 426. 
Reckless assertion, 298. 
Recommendation, letter of, 507. 
Record, satisfaction on the, 427. 
Records of small litigation, 42. 
Recovery, effecting a, 228. 
Redesdale, Lord, 408, 427. 
Reed, Thomas B., 205, 378, 429, 436, 

519. 
Referee, 390, 471. 
Referring to the leaders, 97. 
Reflected light, by no, 472. 
Reflection, a strong, 362. 
Regions, lower, 475. 
Religion, a minister of, 327. 

every man his, 459. 

what, 327. 
Remainder contingent, like a, 151. 
Remarked yesterday, as I, 432. 
Remedied, shall be, 330. 
Renouncing the inheritance, 250. 
Repartee, attorneys, 432. 

judges, 438. 



Repartee, witnesses, 445. 

Repeal, for, 372. 

Repealed, act, 223. 

Repetition, mere, 158. 

Replevin, what is, 203. 

Replies to toasts, 28, 82, 343, 349, 

476. 
Reporters, beating the, 369. 
Reports, only Missouri. 330. 

Queen's Bench, 326. 
Representatives, House of, 432. 
Reptile shyster, 396. 
Republican then, a, 73. 
Reputation for honesty, 448. 

general, 448. 
Rescues your estate, 290. 
Reservoir of Roman liberty, 181- 
Resign, asking him to, 409. 
Rest, in the matter of, 43. 
Resting his mind, 433. 
Retained for the snake, 535. 
Retort, attorneys, 432. 
judges, 438. 
witnesses, 445. 
Revenue only, for, 289. 

streams of, 523. 
Reversing the lower court, 208. 
Review, sacred forms passing in,. 

149. 
Revising the code, 31, 218. 
Revocation, revoking her own,. 

536. 
Revoking hor own revocation,. 

ends by, 536. 
Reynolds, Marcus T., 518. 
Rhetoric, Aristotle's, 490. 
Rich, one law for the, 338. 
Richmond, a pass to, 301. 
Ridiculous in it, anything, 152* 
Riding alone, 361. 
Ridley, Justice, 4b7. 
Right, all, 236. 



INDEX. 



571 



Right and equity, 188. 

as God gives us to see the, 294. 

decision may be, 41, 310. 

firmness in the, 294. 

reason by the law of, 291. 

side, always on, 490. 

than be president, rather be, 
97, 430. 

was nothing, the, 404, 

when, 385t 
Rises like a dream, 239. 
Rising, early, 313, 455. 
Road, rule of the, 184. 
Roads, in favor of all, 529. 
Rob, whom did he, 377. 
Robbed, Mangan never, 419. 

twice, 419. 
Robbery, convicted of, 462. 

my son's, 377. 
Robe, gentleman of the long, 288. 
Robertson, Lord, 115. 
Robes are lined, lawyers', 290. 

in judicial, 435. 
Rochester, men of, 532. 
Rock of Gibraltar, like the, 180. 

smote the, 523. 
Roguish thing, equity a, 459. 
Roman liberty, reservoir of, 181. 
Rombauer, Justice, 443. 
Rome brick, found, 58. 

had her Caesar, 532. 

in its palmiest days, 532. 
Romer, Lord, 411. 
Rory O'More, 491. 
Rose, Sir George, 185. 
Rosekraus, Enoch H., 451. 
Ross, John, 282. 
Rudiments of the law, 125. 
Ruffian, be rough to the, 129. 
Ruins of antiquity, 411. 
Kule of the road, 184. 

in Shelley's case, 66. 



Rule of equity, a, 101. 
Rules, golden, 118, 129, 468. 
observing the, 219, 355. 
Ruling passion, his, 149. 
Russell, Lord, 107, 452, 533. 
Ryan, E. G., 391. 

Sabbath breaking, 386. 

Sacred forms passing in review, 

149. 
Saddest people, speaking for the, 

368. 
Sagacity, 422. 
Saint, a hypocritical, 77. 
Sale, bill of, 226, 385. 
Same in all languages, 173. 
Sampson, Admiral, 276. 
Sands, David, 407. 
Sat on the bench, 437. 
Satanic majesty, his, 287. 
Satisfaction on record, 427. 
Saunders, R. M., 453. 
Saving his soul, 408. 

the rebels, 304. 
Saxe, John G., 186, 454. 
Say, can't, never, 476. 

die, never, 90. 

what we all, 434. 
Says, means what he, 155. 
Scaffold to scaffold, from, 402. 
Scarecrow of the law, 280. 
Scarlett, Sir James, 132, 140. 
Scates, C. W., 224. 
Schley, Commodore, 276. 
School, does not keep a law, 235v 
Schoolmaster abroad, 59. 
Science, boring a, 178. 

experience and skill, 3. 

law a hocus-pocus, 340. 

mastering the lawless, 410. 
Scotch vote, 452. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 457. 



572 



INDEX. 



Scoundrel, 362, 447, 536. 
Scruples against punishment, 256. 
Seal, 458. 

Seashore, landmarks on, 491. 
Second-class car, in a, 440. 
Seeing Duffy, 448. 
Seizure, excessive, 405. 
Selden, John, 459. 
Self-defense, 280. 

-made man, 402, 505. 
Selling without license, 289. 
Sense, when I cr.nnot talk, 343. 

would have more, 102. 
Sentences, 103, 229, 338, 348, 362, 

460, 515. 
Sentiment, what is, 402. 
Sermon on the mount, 118. 
Services, value of, 282. 
Serving a writ, 4. 
Session, driest speech of the, 151. 
Set, lay and, 409. 

-off, 50. 
Settling constitutional questions, 

205. 
Seward, William H., 300, 303. 
Seymour, Sir Digby, 452. 
Shakes his head, when he, 153. 
Shakespeare, criticising, 101. 
Shaking hands with the jury, 437. 
Sham and conceit, disliking, 228. 
Share, lawyers', 446. 
Sharp quillets of the law, 280. 
Sharswood, George, 33. 
Shave, a close, 112. 
Shaw, here lies John, 186. 

Lemuel, 89, 471. 
Sheep, lamb and, 196. 

of his pasture, 68. 

stealing, 266. 
Sheepish it becomes, more, 196. 
Shell, take ye each a, 280. 
Shelley's case, rule in, 66. 



Sherman, Roger M., 473. 
Sherwood, Thomas A., 330. 
Shining by no reflected light, 472. 
Shovel and spade, 306. 
Show, an equal, 504. 
Shrewd, honest as he is, 295. 

with the crafty, be, 129. 
Shuttlecock, exactly a, 253. 
Shyster, 391. 
Side, only one on his, 263. 

our, 332. 

wrong, 332. 
Sides are Irish, when both, 260. 
Sign, soon the sentence, 515. 
Signal service to navigators, 491. 
Silurian epoch, 399. 
Sitting at nisi prius, 63. 
Sixteen-to-one, 499. 
Size, about your own, 330. 
Skeleton, a mere, 180. 
Skill, science, experience and, 3. 
Slander and libel, 307. 
Sleeping a century, 364. 

judges, 294, 432. 
Slow judge, make a, 325. 
Small insignificant creature, a, 
330. 

litigation, records of, 42. 
Smith, James, 185. 

John W., 281. 

Sydney, 58, 250, 332, 526. 
Smoky mill, a, 497. 
Smote the rock, 523. 
Snake, retained for the, 535. 
Snare of his speech, 96. 
Sneeze, when the judges, 410. 
Snuff, take a pinch of, 410. 
Sober as a judge, 240. 
Soldier defence, old, 26. 

no, 152. 
Solemn affidavit, violating a, 5. 

as an ass, 119. 



INDEX. 



573 



Son assault demesne, 302, 407. 
Song and story, land of, 476. 
Sophistry, brief for, 90. 
Soul, no music in his, 418. 

of wit, 49. 

saving his, 408. 
Sound lawyer, a, 439. 

old head, in his, 254. 
South. I know no, 96. 

lawyer of the, 350. 
Sovereign over the Atlantic, 453. 
Sovereigns of sovereigns, 280. 
Spade and shovel, 306. 
Spanish, quoting, 19. 
Speaking for posterity, 97. 

from observation, 435. 

to the minutes, 356. 
Special pleading, 404. 
Specimen of a modern law-suit, 

157. 
Speech, a dry, 151. 

a forty years', 168. 

fatal facility of, 52. 

lowest terms for a, 161. 

read his last, 153. 

stuff not your, 50. 
Speed of train, 500. 
Spencer, Ambrose, 513. 

Joshua A, 473. 
Spider of the law. old, 281. 
Splitting the difference, 487, 511. 
Spoken for the cause, 324. 
Spooner, Allen C. 356. 
Stake to stake, from, 402. 
Stanton, Edwin M., 301. 
Stare decisis, 34 
Stars and stripes, 403. 
Started where most reasoners end, 

423. 
Starvation camp, 160. 
State line, 90. 

mortuary, 35. 



State trials. 251. 
Stated that before, 442. 
Statement of facts, 309, 404, 429, 

477. 
Staten Island jury, a, 513. 
Statesman defined, 430. 

truth from, 402. 
Statues, like marble, 181. 
Statute against it, 291. 

contrary to form of, 408. 

obsolete, 411. 

what is a, 291. 
Staying proceedings, 103. 
Steal a farm, thirteen men to, 512. 

thou shalt not, 101. 
Steam-engine in trousers, 526. 
Steeple, fitter for the, 152. 
Stein, Philip, 440. 
Stenography, 473. 
Stephen, Justice, 332. 
Stephens, Alexander H., 474. 
Stevens, Thaddeus, 116, 475. 
Stevenson, George, 277. 
Stewart, William M., 284, 
Stick together, must, 474. 
Stop, arrest and, 386. 

it, two hundred if you can, 
438. 
Stories, different, 446. 
Story, Joseph, 49, 324, 379, 476. 

never above one, 476. 
Stowe, Edwin H., 322. 
Stowell, Lord, 175. 
Straw, a man of, 327. 
Stream, when crossing the, 301. 
Streams of revenue gushed forth, 

523. 
Strength of lungs, for, 289. 
Stricken from the docket, 250. 
Strict judge, 391. 
Strike me, may the Almighty, 229. 

when down, 4, 485. 



£74 



INDEX. 



Strike with the mass of thought, 

49. 
Strikes, law of, 185. 
Stripes, stars and, 403. 
Stripped of verbiage, 489. 
Strong, William, 126. 
Strother, Francis, 476. 
Strout, A. A., 437. 
Study from morning till night, 

378. 
Studying mind reading, 118. 
Stuff not your speech, 50. 
Stupid answer, a, 179. 
judges, 92, 533. 
old and deaf, 533. 
Stuttering Curran, 148. 

Travers, 505. 
Style, cultivate a simple, 543. 
Subpoena, 326. 
Subscribe, wouldn't, 365. 
Subtracting from knowledge, 430. 
Succeed in the law, to, 46, 87, 119, 

174, 267, 281, 540. 
Succeeds the age of brass, 184. 
Success at the bar, 46, 87, 119, 174, 

267, 281, 540. 
Successful counsel, 123. 

politician, a, 430. 
Sugden, Sir Edward, 59. 
Suicide, temptation to commit, 

197. 
Summing up of Mansfield, Thur- 

low's, 501. 
Sumner, Charles, 479. 
Sunshine of an open heart, 282. 
Superiority, conscious, 544. 
Sure to be wrong, 41, 310. 
Surety, 154. 

Surgeon, employed as a, 178. 
Sutherland, Josiah, 479. 
■Swapping horses, 301. 



Swearing, makes his living by, 
211. 
to the truth, 366. 
Sweeping clause, the, 194. 

cobwebs, 402. 
Swimmingly, getting on, 362. 
Swindle him out of his throne, 
288. 

Tact, 480. 

Taddy, Sergeant, 110. 

Take ye each a shell, 280. 

Tale, who draws a tedious, 50. 

Talent and tact, 480. 

Talk sense, when I cannot, 343. 

Talker, a good, 505. 

Talking sense, 343. 

to rest his mind, 433. 

to the governor, 230. 
Tariff, bill, a, 419. 

defending the, 417. 
Taste, definition of, 174. 
Tax returns, 74. 

titles, 37. 

trying to escape the inherit- 
ance, 250. 
Taylor, Colonel, 18. 
Team, Demerara, 114. 
Technical terms, mastering, 201. 
Technicalities, despising, 178. 
Tedious tale, who draws a, 50. 
Telling the truth for nothing, 445. 
Temper, do not lose your, 129. 
Tenantry, the Irish, 200. 
Tender, making a, 183. 
Tenterden, Lord, 490. 
Term, merger of a, 179. 
Terms for a speech, lowest, 161. 

mastering technical, 201. 
Test, Justice, 438. 
Testamentary papers, 537. 



INDEX 



575 



Testator, jolly, 536. 
Testimony, 491. 
Thatcher, George, 443. 
Theory of politics, true, 344* 

of the case, 522. 
Thesiger, Sir Frederick, 500. 
Thief, hang when young, 49. 
Things of a higher nature, 343. 
Think of his poor mother, 181. 
Thinking aloud, 387. 
Thirst for office, great, 508. 
Thirteen men to steal a farm, 513. 
Thirteenth juror, 254, 489. 
Thompson, Richard W., 295. 
Thou art the clay, 198. 

shalt not steal, 101. 
Though the heavens fall, 330. 
Thought, strike with the mass 

of, 49. 
Thurber's turkey, as fine as, 100. 
Thurlow, Lord, 501. 
Thurston, John M., 502. 
Ticket, railway, 314, 515. 
Tickle my client, 266. 
Tigers, Bengal, 94. 
Time, don't waste your, 385. 

exhausts, 102. 

one at a, 68. 

precise, 24. 

shall be no more, when, 319. 

you have me this, 365. 
Tipstaff, 178, 333, 438, 502. 
Titles, tax, 37. 
Toasts, response to, 28, 82, 343, 349, 

476. 
Together, stick, 474. 
Tolerant of every faith, 368. 
Tomb, on pleader's, 187. 
To-morrow, call, 267. 

never put off until, 67. 
Tongue, pliancy of, 289. 
Toombs, Robert, 474. 



Tower of Babel, 133. 
Townsend, J. B., 357. 
Townshend, Charles, 504, 
Train, Charles R, 164. 

speed of, 500. 
Traitor, 459. 
Traveling incog., 241. 
Travers, William R., 505. 
Treason, 335. 
Treasury, golden, 541. 

of wit and wisdom, 541. 
Trespassing, 443. 

Trial, motion for new, 61,189,356. 
Trials, state, 351. 

Tribute to the common law, 383. 
Trick worth two of that, 175. 
Trickery may win, 282. 
Trimming, differ about, 459. 
Triumphant peace, 346. 
Trousers, engine in, 526. 
True bill, a, 152. 
Truly condescending, 390. 
Trumpet of fame, 310. 
Truth and honesty, character for, 
448. 

finds the, 41. 

from a statesman, 403. 

greater the, 341. 

killing the, 413. 

swearing to, 4 

telling the, 413, 445, 446. 

wedded to the, 326. 
. what is, 105. 

wrestling with, 506. 
Trying in Irish, 249. 
Turkey, as fine as Thurber's, 100. 
Turn about, fair play, 342. 

-coats, 174 

over, 171. 
Turner, Bates, 437. 
Turney, James, 465. 
Turpentine, 2. 



576 



INDEX 



Two sides, 332. 

Tyranny begins, there, 281. 

Ugliness, 91. 

Ultimatum respondent^ 182. 
Unanimous verdict, 514 
Unbalanced, very much, 537. 
Uncertainty, glorious, 340. 

in description, 37. 
Unconstitutional, 206. 
Understand it, perhaps the court 
will, 62. 

them, don't, 434. 

you to say, do I, 448. 
Understanding between them, no, 
173. 

floodgates of the, 189. 

the points, 262. 
Understood, meant to be, 437. 
Undertaker, an, 263. 
Underwood, William H., 506. 
Unfortunate client, 179. 
Union, liberty and, 523. 

chorus of the, 294. 

is my country, the, 97. 

music of the, 88. 

our Federal, 247. 
Unit, conjugal, 41. 

in the cabinet, only, 58. 
Unjust thing, when about to do 

an, 411. 
United States Supreme Court, 90, 

124, 225. 
Unlimited power corrupts, 281. 
Unrepentant, error, 330. 
Unspotted, living, 74. 

Value to them, giving, 58. 
Van Brunt, Justice, 83. 
Van Buren, John, 508. 
Vance, Zebulon B., 510. 
Verb, declining a, 147. 



Verbal agreement, a, 181. 
Verbiage, stripped of, 489. 
Verdict, 379, 510. 
Vermin shyster, 397. 
Very dull, 307. 
Vest, George, 399. 
Veteran of the war, 26. 
Victory in law is won, 50. 
Vigilance committee, epitaph by, 

188. 
Vine, land of cedar and, 275. 
Violating a solemn affidavit, 5. 
Virago, a first-class, 434. 
Virginian, not a, 235. 
Virtue, incarnation of piety and, 

77. 
Virtues, contemplating their, 82. 
Vocabulary, airing his, 150. 

of the card-table, 437. 
Voorhees, Daniel W., 297. 
Vote, Scotch, 452. 

Waite, M. R, 284, 515. 

Waiting to call the next witness, 

435. 
Walking in the air, 312. 
Wall to the blackguard, 424. 
Walton, Charles W., 516. 
Walworth, R H., 517. 
Wandering in the wilderness, 40. 
War, mistakes of the, 13. 

veteran of the, 26. 
Ward, Baron, 251. 
Ware, Eugene F., 334, 519. 
Warner, Charles Dudley, 520. 
Washington or Columbus, 382. 
Waste your time, never, 385. 
Water, angler of the first, 453. 

case, a, 186. 
Watermelon, dropping the, 484. 
We are the potters, 198. 
Wear a chain, no man, 403. 



INDEX. 



577 



Webster, Daniel, 78, 323. 378, 522. 

murder, the, 72. 
Wedded to the truth, 326. 
West, the farther I go, 253. 
Westbuiy, Richard B., 186, 533. 
Westmoreland, Lord, 179. 
Wetherell, Sir Charles, 534. 
What is an archdeacon, 14. 

is truth, 105. 
Wheeler, E. D., 357. 
When I can't talk sense, 343. 
Whigs all ciphers, 58. 
Whist, flaying, 63. 
Whistle, seven-foot, 298. 
White, black, 379. 

man or negro, 297. 
Whiton, Edward V., 534. 
Who matches a lawyer, 289. 
Widower, 326. 
Wife, husband and, 41. 

legal rights of, 41. 
Wightman, Justice, 442. 
Wigs, 40, 152, 220, 361. 
Wilderness, Moses wandering in 
the, 40. 

of single instances, 410. 
Wilkins, Charles, 25, 482, 535. 
Will, 536. 

Williams, Elisha, 21. 
Wills, 536. 

Justice, 433. 
Wiltse, H. M., 396. 
Win, trickery may, 282. 
Wings, clipping his, 95. 

to his imagination, 61. 
Winning the case, 366, 399. 
Wirt, William, 315, 316, 411, 531, 

540. 
Wisdom led by folly, 98. 

manners often hide, 472, 

of successive ages, 404 
37 



Wisdom, perfection of, 281. 

treasury of wit and, 541. 
Wise, looking, 254 

men from the east, 253. 

or witty, 536. 
Wiser, not one bit the, 378. 

than a daw, no, 280. 
Wit and wisdom, treasury of, 541. 

foundation of, 193. 

full of, 294 

soul of, 49. 
Witchcraft, 312. 
Witness offensively familiar, 446. 

waiting to call the next, 435. 
Witnesses, jury and court, 187. 

repartee, 445. 

retort, 445. 
Wits, court and its little, 90. 
Witty, wise or, 536. 
Woman who makes her own will,. 

536. 
Won, victory in law is, 50. 
Wonder grew, and still the, 81. 
Wonders now and then, Godl 

works, 186. 
Woodle, Isaac, 534 
Wool, all cry, little, 143. 
Woolsack, one stage from, 58. 
Words ahead, fifteen, 474 

mere, 291. 

spoken, indictment for, 204 
Working by the hour, 521. 

like a horse, 171. 
World, foolery governs the, 459* 
Worst has merits, 290. 

judge in England, 534. 

of a horse trade, 297. 
Worth, at its, 211. 

the price, not, 517. 

two of that, trick, 175. 
Wounded, fatally, 497. 



578 



INDEX. 



Wrestling with the truth, 506. 
Wretches hang, 515. 
Writ, quashing a, 355. 

serving a, 4 
Wright, George G., 243. 
Wrong, all, 318. 

argument, 41. 

in the principle, 410. 

never defend, 300. 

side, 332. 

sure to be, 41, 310. 

wherein it is, 318. 



Yankee carpet-bagger, 8. 

characteristics, 160. 
Yea, all that a man hath, 71. 
Yes or no, 53, 490. 
Yesterday, as I remarked, 432. 
Young, hang a thief when, 49. 

lawyer, hints to the, 281. 

Lord, 435. 

merciful to the, 129. 

Zephyr, a Kansas, 519. 
light wings of, 275. 



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